But he was fond of games of mental skill, and curiously enough, first gained distinction, not in letters but at the chessboard, and in the course of his subsequent travels he challenged and defeated the champions of Europe. He was concerned for a short time in business; but being left with an independent income at the death of his father, he resolved to devote himself to study. He traveled for a year on the Continent, learning on the spot the languages of the countries he passed through. In time he became an accomplished linguist, reading nineteen languages and conversing fluently in seven.
By the time he was nineteen he had resolved to write a great historic work, of a nature not yet attempted by any one. To prepare himself for this monumental labor, and to make up for past deficiencies, he settled in London; and, apparently single-handed and without the advice or help of tutors or professional men, entered upon that course of voluminous reading on which his erudition rests.
He is a singular instance of a self-taught man, without scientific or academic training, producing a work that marks an epoch in historical literature. With a wonderful memory, he had, like Macaulay, the gift of getting the meaning and value of a book by simply glancing over the pages. On an average he could read with intelligent comprehension three books in a working day of eight hours, and in time mastered his library of twenty-two thousand volumes, indexing every book on the back, and transcribing many pages into his commonplace-books. In this way he spent fifteen years of study in collecting his materials.
The first volume of his introduction to the 'History of Civilization in England' appeared in 1857, and aroused an extraordinary interest because of the novelty and audacity of its statements. It was both bitterly attacked and enthusiastically praised, as it antagonized or attracted its readers. Buckle became the intellectual hero of the hour. The second volume appeared in May, 1861. And now, worn out by overwork, his delicate nerves completely unstrung by the death of his mother, who had remained his first and only love, he left England for the East, in company with the two young sons of a friend. In Palestine he was stricken with typhoid fever, and died at Damascus on May 29th, 1862. His grave is marked by a marble tomb with the inscription from the Arabic:--
"The written word remains long after the writer;
The writer is resting under the earth, but his works endure."
Three volumes of 'Miscellanies and Posthumous Works,' edited by Helen Taylor, were published in 1872. Among these are a lecture on 'Woman,' delivered before the Royal Institution,--Buckle's single and very successful attempt at public speaking,--and a Review of Mill's 'Liberty,' one of the finest contemporary appreciations of that thinker. But he wrote little outside his 'History,' devoting himself with entire singleness of purpose to his life-work.
The introduction to the 'History of Civilization in England' has been aptly called the "fragment of a fragment." When as a mere youth he outlined his work, he overestimated the extremest accomplishment of a single mind, and did not clearly comprehend the vastness of the undertaking. He had planned a general history of civilization; but as the material increased on his hands he was forced to limit his project, and finally decided to confine his work to a consideration of England from the middle of the sixteenth century. In February, 1853, he wrote to a friend:--
"I have been long convinced that the progress of every people is regulated by principles--or as they are called, laws--as regular and as certain as those which govern the physical world. To discover these laws is the object of my work.... I propose to take a general survey of the moral, intellectual, and legislative peculiarities of the great countries of Europe; and I hope to point out the circumstances under which these peculiarities have arisen. This will lead to a perception of certain relations between the various stages through which each people have progressively passed. Of these general relations I intend to make a particular application; and by a careful analysis of the history of England, show how they have regulated our civilization, and how the successive and apparently the arbitrary forms of our opinions, our literature, our laws, and our manners, have naturally grown out of their antecedents."
This general scheme was adhered to in the published history, and he supported his views by a vast array of illustrations and proofs. The main ideas advanced in the Introduction--for he did not live to write the body of the work, the future volumes to which he often pathetically refers--these ideas may be thus stated:--First: Nothing had yet been done toward discovering the principles underlying the character and destiny of nations, to establish a basis for a science of history,--a task which Buckle proposed to himself. Second: Experience shows that nations are governed by laws as fixed and regular as the laws of the physical world. Third: Climate, soil, food, and the aspects of nature are the primary causes in forming the character of a nation. Fourth: The civilization within and without Europe is determined by the fact that in Europe man is stronger than nature, and here alone has subdued her to his service; whereas on the other continents nature is the stronger and man has been subdued by her. Fifth: The continually increasing influence of mental laws and the continually diminishing influence of physical laws characterize the advance of European civilization. Sixth: The mental laws regulating the progress of society can only be discovered by such a comprehensive survey of facts as will enable us to eliminate disturbances; namely, by the method of averages. Seventh: Human progress is due to intellectual activity, which continually changes and expands, rather than to moral agencies, which from the beginnings of society have been more or less stationary. Eighth: In human affairs in general, individual efforts are insignificant, and great men work for evil rather than for good, and are moreover merely incidental to their age. Ninth: Religion, literature, art, and government instead of being causes of civilization, are merely its products. Tenth: The progress of civilization varies directly as skepticism--the disposition to doubt, or the "protective spirit"--the disposition to maintain without examination established beliefs and practices, predominates.
The new scientific methods of Darwin and Mill were just then being eagerly discussed in England; and Buckle, an alert student and great admirer of Mill, in touch with the new movements of the day, proposed, "by applying to the history of man those methods of investigation which have been found successful in other branches of knowledge, and rejecting all preconceived notions which could not bear the test of those methods," to remove history from the condemnation of being a mere series of arbitrary facts, or a biography of famous men, or the small-beer chronicle of court gossip and intrigues, and to raise it to the level of an exact science, subject to mental laws as rigid and infallible as the laws of nature:--