he fell;-historians who do this for us, and nothing more, are contemptuously classed by Mr. Buckle as "biographers, genealogists, collectors of anecdotes, chroniclers of courts," or as mere compilers, who "trespass on a province far above their own." We are not sure but that any painting which helps us to realise vividly one living crisis of past history is a deeper lesson in historic wisdom than to master the whole train of "successive generalisations," which can be got exclusively by comparing the different "totalities of human knowledge" at different ages of the world. In fact, history does not its work for us at all unless it teaches us to distinguish between the variable and the essential in human existence; and this it cannot adequately do unless it makes us realise how the deeper life of the past had as vivid a ripple of temporary interest on its surface as our own. We are apt to lose half the wisdom that history might give us, by disconnecting the dim historic forms that flit before us from the detail and characteristic "anecdote" of outward and daily life. Perhaps Plutarch has taught the world full as much as Thucydides. We do not realise even what ancient vices and ancient virtues mean,—we do not see the significance of faith, or idolatry, or law,—until the minute biographic touches, which Mr. Buckle seems so much to despise, are added to those "generalisations" concerning the "totalities of human knowledge" which he appears to consider the exclusive work of the historian. Even, therefore, if the intellect were (which we do not in the least believe) the dynamic or moving principle in human history, we should utterly deny that a historian who should exclusively narrate those events which "furnish new truths, or the means by which new truths could be discovered," had performed even the most essential portion of his task. We read history to see what man was, not only to see what he became. But though this be true of history, is it equally true of the history of civilisation? Is not civilisation a state of becoming, not a state of being? Though our author does not take the distinction for himself, we may fairly take it for him. He might say truly enough that the historian of a nation's civilisation is not bound to give the picture of its whole life; but of the modifications only that arise from time to time in that life, as its society became more and more (or less and less) civilised. And this is true enough; but still these changes, as they arise, must be connected with the deeper workings of the national life, otherwise it is certain that they will not be truly recorded at all. According to Mr. Buckle's theory of civilisation, this is not in the least necessary; for the moral life of nations is eliminated when you look at them on a scale sufficiently large. The good and evil, the justice and the injustice, the humility and the ambition, are, on the whole, in equilibrium; and to write the history of a nation's civilisation is to write the history of its intellect, which alone can inherit the experience of the past, and alone, therefore, sways the social changes of the present. The intellect of past ages raises the platform on which the intellect of this age stands; but it is not so with conscience and emotion. We do not distinguish right and wrong more vividly; we do not love and hate. more intensely; we do not believe with increasing and more unquestioning trust,-because our fathers have weighed right and wrong, have loved and hated and trusted, before us. We can distance them more and more in knowledge; but the moral level of age after age fluctuates between nearly the same limits. -- This is Mr. Buckle's argument; and we will willingly concede that the intellect is becoming a more and more powerful instrument in human civilisation. But the instrument of civilisation is one thing, and civilisation itself quite another. It is not in the least true, but the reverse of true, that the intellectual laws are the "superior" laws, which gain more and more upon the physical, moral, and spiritual laws. It is not in the least true that the intellect is the superior faculty, the faculty that is capable of the most indefinite expansion, and which assumes therefore constantly increasing proportions to the physical, moral, and spiritual faculties. The intellect has not more expansive force than many other faculties of human nature, and not so much as some. When Mr. Buckle distinguishes between the intellectual nature of man and his moral and spiritual nature in this, that the first is more "essentially cumulative" in its influence on human history than the latter, no doubt he meant to express an observed fact. But what is the fact which he had observed? No doubt this, that all moral and spiritual truths need, as we may say, perpetual verification and re-discovery, in order to exert an influence at all; while intellectual truths exert a large influence as mere machinery,-as fixed data which the practical man turns into practical convenience. Embody the discovery of the atmosphere's weight in a barometer; and even if the truth on which it rests should ever be forgotten, the invention which was the offspring of that truth might still survive to accommodate mankind. But embody the truth that "the more familiar we are with moral evil, the less we know of it;" or that "the word of God is quick and powerful as any two-edged sword,"-in any form you will, and they convey no meaning at all, except so far as the spirit in which they were first recorded is still alive; and if they are crystallised into moral or religious institutions, those institutions must become sheer dead weights on society in proportion as their spiritual significance dies away. This is clearly Mr. Buckle's meaning, and no doubt it is correct; but it is very ill expressed by saying that intellectual power is cumulative, and moral or spiritual power not so. For it is exactly in proportion as intellectual power is capable of yielding fruits which are non-intellectual, that it is more cumulative than moral or spiritual power. In other words, so far as the intellect can be made the effective instrument of other human desires and capacities beside the intellect, so far is it more cumulative than faculties which have no end out of themselves. But this is only saying that intellectual agencies are subsidiary and instrumental to moral and spiritual agencies, while the latter are not subsidiary and instrumental to the former. Suppose for a moment that it were necessary for all the intellectual processes which lead to scientific results,-to the telegraph, or to the manufacture of cotton, or to the cure of disease, to be more or less adequately realised by all who benefit by them, as it is in the case of moral and spiritual truth,and we should soon find that intellectual truth was far less cumulative than moral or spiritual truth. It is not so with the results of intellectual discovery, simply because these results become subordinate agencies to other and more active portions of human nature. The intellectual laws are, in fact, immediately subordinated to the physical, moral, and spiritual desires. The results of intellectual discovery in the streets of London are accumulated, distributed, consumed, far less in accordance with intellectual laws than with those primitive wants and desires of human nature which they are the mere instruments of satisfying. For example, Mr. Buckle has formed the marvellous and, for a man of his intellectual attainment, almost incredible conviction, that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is "probably the most important book that has ever been written." Now, supposing it were so, how much could that book have effected through purely intellectual agency, if its conclusions had not been directly subsidiary to some of the strongest passions of human nature-the desire for subsistence and wealth, and all to which wealth is more or less subordinate? Much, no doubt, of the commercial greatness of this country is caused by the clearer vision which, through Adam Smith, these desires have attained. But what could the theory have done without the desires? Which was the cumulative, and which the merely subordinate, agent? The legislator learned of Adam Smith, and set commerce free. But this might have been done and not a step gained, had not the eager forces of physical and moral desire pushed in to fill at once the ground thus gained. The intellect is cumulative in Mr. Buckle's sense only because its results are fitly instrumental to desires that are other than intellectual; while the higher capacities of human nature have their fittest ends only in themselves, and are utterly distorted and defaced by being made the instru ments of lower capacities. The transit instrument, the church, the school, the shop, the locomotive, the organ, are all more or less results of intellectual power; but all, excepting only the first of the series, exhibit the intellectual power in service to other than intellectual desires; and it may be affirmed without hesitation, that it is rather the weakness or strength of these desires than any intellectual consideration which determines the civilisation of a nation. Why has India stood still for ages? Not for want of intellectual faculty, but for want of spiritual, moral, and physical energy,-from languor of wish, and languor of will, and languor of conscience, and languor of trust,-because the intellectual faculty has found no active employers, because the "slave of the lamp" has never been summoned to his work. Why, too, did Mr. Buckle take no note of the decay of Greece and Rome, where the intellectual conditions were all present, and were not "cumulative" because the moral forces which used them were all in anarchy and selfish discord? It is worth noting, again, that there is no trace of any tendency in the intellectual faculties to gain way on the other elements of human nature. No doubt they are developed in a larger proportion of the people of modern days; but their intrinsic capacity for relative expansion is as limited by the pressure of other wants and desires as ever. No intellect of later days has ever equalled that of Plato. Probably in the intellectual classes of Greece the relative power of the intellect in proportion to the remainder of human nature attained its climax, because it was then disproportionately strong. Mr. Buckle's deeply-rooted impression that the intellectual laws of society are the "superior laws," that they exhibit the dynamics" of social existence, the moving forces, instead of the merely facilitating conditions for other and deeper forces to work upon, is fostered by his extraordinary preference for statistics over psychology as an index to the real laws of the human mind. He tells us that self-observation can never lead to any accurate result, that it misleads metaphysicians into all sorts of falsehood,— that the observation is made through a disturbing medium, because the watching consciousness is subject to the very fluctuations of temper it needs to watch,-that, in short, the laws that statistics reveal are certain because they are laws independent of the accidents of individual character, while the individual observer must be in danger of generalising what is peculiar to himself. Thus he proves free-will to be a chimera by the statistics of crime and suicide, which show an unchanged average result for unchanged physical and social conditions; and he explains to us that "parallel chains of evidence" "force us to the conclusion that the offences of men result not so much from the vices of the individual offender as from the state of society into which that individual is thrown." We must devote a few words to this statistical aspect of civilising causes, because we believe it to be one of the most telling fallacies which sustain Mr. Buckle and his school in the refusal to look within the mind, at the sources of volition, for the sources of national decay and national greatness; while it really is one of the very shallowest fallacies by which acute intellects can be deceived. The advocates of this theory do not see that statistics could not reveal the real laws of any phenomena at all unless the phenomena studied were subject only to one simple law of causation. No doubt statistics might and did reveal the law that falling bodies pass through spaces due to the earth's attraction in the successive seconds; but this is only because the attraction of the earth is the one force, totally overpowering all complicating and disturbing forces. But as applied to a complication of causes, all that statistics can possibly show is the residual force,-the feather that turns the scale. Statistics can indicate by no sort of sign the powerful forces which are counteracted by other powerful forces. If the opposite scales are weighted with powers that, uncounteracted, would move the world, the putting in of the feather will still be followed by the descent of the scale, just as if they had both been empty; and the statistician writes down the feather as the sole cause of the event. Now how such a process, which necessarily eliminates all the temporarily counterpoising forces of human nature from its consideration altogether, can be supposed to reveal the proper laws of the human mind seems marvellous enough. Statistics, if carefully drawn up, may be very useful in detecting slight residual influences; but as superseding investigation into the mass of the powers really at work, it leads to mere delusion; and as an attestation of the necessarian doctrine, it seems to us a thoroughly wonderful piece of juggling. No man supposes that the will is uninfluenced by motives, though he may believe that it has a power of determining to what solicitations it will surrender. No man denies that the more temptation there is, the more crime there is likely to be; the only question being, whether the proportionate increase is always so exact that it leaves no room for the intervention of a certain expense of resisting power. And if any man can speak certainly for himself that his pressing temptations have ever increased in a greater proportion than his moral restraints without producing a proportionate increase in his surrender to those temptations, he has solved the problem for himself at once and for ever. The indeterminate influence of the will, which, if really free to choose between opposite solicitations, might necessarily be thrown into either scale, could not possibly be discovered by statistics without a previous certainty of the equilibrium of other tendencies, which it is impossible to ascertain. And even |