"Instead of telling us of those things which alone have any value--instead of giving us information respecting the progress of knowledge and the way in which mankind has been affected by the diffusion of that knowledge ... the vast majority of historians fill their works with the most trifling and miserable details.... In other great branches of knowledge, observation has preceded discovery; first the facts have been registered and then their laws have been found. But in the study of the history of man, the important facts have been neglected and the unimportant ones preserved. The consequence is, that whoever now attempts to generalize historical phenomena must collect the facts as well as conduct the generalization."
Buckle's ideal of the office and acquirements of the historian was of the highest. He must indeed possess a synthesis of the whole range of human knowledge to explain the progress of man. By connecting history with political economy and statistics, he strove to make it exact. And he exemplified his theories by taking up branches of scientific investigation hitherto considered entirely outside the province of the historian. He first wrote history scientifically, pursuing the same methods and using the same kinds of proofs as the scientific worker. The first volume excited as much angry discussion as Darwin's 'Origin of Species' had done in its day. The boldness of its generalizations, its uncompromising and dogmatic tone, irritated more than one class of readers. The chapters on Spain and on Scotland, with their strictures on the religions of those countries, containing some of the most brilliant passages in the book, brought up in arms against him both Catholics and Presbyterians. Trained scientists blamed him for encroaching on their domains with an insufficient knowledge of the phenomena of the natural world, whence resulted a defective logic and vague generalizations.
It is true that Buckle was not trained in the methods of the schools; that he labored under the disadvantage of a self-taught, solitary worker, not receiving the friction of other vigorous minds; and that his reading, if extensive, was not always wisely chosen, and from its very amount often ill-digested. He had knowledge rather than true learning, and taking this knowledge at second hand, often relied on sources that proved either untrustworthy or antiquated, for he lacked the true relator's fine discrimination, that weighs and sifts authorities and rejects the inadequate. Malicious critics declared that all was grist that came to his mill. Yet his popularity with that class of readers whom he did not shock by his disquisitions on religions and morals, or make distrustful by his sweeping generalizations and scientific inaccuracies, is due to the fact that his book appeared at the right moment: for the time was really come to make history something more than a chronicle of detached facts and anecdotes. The scientific spirit was awake, and demanded that human action, like the processes of nature, be made the subject of general law. The mind of Buckle proved fruitful soil for those germs of thought floating in the air, and he gave them visible form in his history. If he was not a leader, he was a brilliant formulator of thought, and he was the first to put before the reading world, then ready to receive them, ideas and speculations till now belonging to the student. For he wrote with the determination to be intelligible to the general reader. It detracts nothing from the permanent value of his work thus to state its genesis, for this is merely to apply to it his own methods.
Moreover, a perpetual charm lies in his clear, limpid English, a medium perfectly adapted to calm exposition or to impassioned rhetoric. Whatever the defects of Buckle's system: whatever the inaccuracies that the advance of thirty years of patient scientific labors can easily point out; however sweeping his generalization; or however dogmatic his assertions, the book must be allowed high rank among the works that set men thinking, and must thus be conceded to possess enduring value.
MORAL VERSUS INTELLECTUAL PRINCIPLES IN HUMAN PROGRESS
From the 'History of Civilization in England'
There is unquestionably nothing to be found in the world which has undergone so little change as those great dogmas of which moral systems are composed. To do good to others; to sacrifice for their benefit your own wishes; to love your neighbor as yourself; to forgive your enemies; to restrain your passions; to honor your parents; to respect those who are set over you,--these and a few others are the sole essentials of morals: but they have been known for thousands of years, and not one jot or tittle has been added to them by all the sermons, homilies, and text-books which moralists and theologians have been able to produce. But if we contrast this stationary aspect of moral truths with the progressive aspect of intellectual truths, the difference is indeed startling. All the great moral systems which have exercised much influence have been fundamentally the same; all the great intellectual systems have been fundamentally different. In reference to our moral conduct, there is not a single principle now known to the most cultivated Europeans which was not likewise known to the ancients. In reference to the conduct of our intellect, the moderns have not only made the most important additions to every department of knowledge that the ancients ever attempted to study, but besides this they have upset and revolutionized the old methods of inquiry; they have consolidated into one great scheme all those resources of induction which Aristotle alone dimly perceived; and they have created sciences, the faintest idea of which never entered the mind of the boldest thinker antiquity produced.
These are, to every educated man, recognized and notorious facts; and the inference to be drawn from them is immediately obvious. Since civilization is the product of moral and intellectual agencies, and since that product is constantly changing, it evidently cannot be regulated by the stationary agent; because, when surrounding circumstances are unchanged, a stationary agent can only produce a stationary effect. The only other agent is the intellectual one; and that this is the real mover may be proved in two distinct ways: first because, being as we have already seen either moral or intellectual, and being as we have also seen not moral, it must be intellectual; and secondly, because the intellectual principle has an activity and a capacity for adaptation which, as I undertake to show, is quite sufficient to account for the extraordinary progress that during several centuries Europe has continued to make.