History of Civilisation in England
Henry Thomas Buckle was born at Lee, in Kent, England, Nov. 24, 1821. Delicate health prevented him from following the ordinary school course. His father's death in 1840 left him independent, and the boy who was brought up in Toryism and Calvinism, became a philosophic radical and free-thinker. He travelled, he read, he acquired facility in nineteen languages and fluency in seven. Gradually he conceived the idea of a great work which should place history on an entirely new footing; it should concern itself not with the unimportant and the personal, but with the advance of civilisation, the intellectual progress of man. As the idea developed, he perceived that the task was greater than could be accomplished in the lifetime of one man. What he actually accomplished--the volumes which bear the title "The History of Civilisation in England"--was intended to be no more than an introduction to the subject; and even that introduction, which was meant to cover, on a corresponding scale, the civilisation of several other countries, was never finished. The first volume was published in 1857, the second in 1861; only the studies of England, France, Spain, and Scotland were completed. Buckle died at Damascus, on May 29, 1862.
I.---General Principles
The believer in the possibility of a science of history is not called upon to hold either the doctrine of predestination or that of freedom of the will. The only positions which at the outset need to be conceded are that when we perform an action we perform it in consequence of some motive or motives; that those motives are the result of some antecedents; and that, therefore, if we were acquainted with the whole of the precedents and with all the laws of their movements we could with unerring certainty predict the whole of their immediate results.
History is the modification of man by nature and of nature by man. We shall find a regularity in the variations of virtuous and vicious actions that proves them to be the result of large and general causes which, working upon the aggregate of society, must produce certain consequences without regard to the decision of particular individuals.
Man is affected by purely physical agents--climate, food, soil, geographical conditions, and active physical phenomena. In the earliest civilisations nature is more prominent than man, and the imagination is more stimulated than the understanding. In the European civilisations man is the more prominent, and the understanding is more stimulated than the imagination. Hence the advance of European civilisation is characterised by a diminishing influence of physical laws and an increasing influence of mental laws. Clearly, then, of the two classes of laws which regulate the progress of mankind the mental class is more important than the physical. The laws of the human mind will prove to be the ultimate basis of the history of Europe. These are not to be ascertained by the metaphysical method of studying the inquirer's own mind alone, but by the historical method of studying many minds. And this whether the metaphysician belongs to the school which starts by examining the sensations, or to that which starts with the examination of ideas.
Dismissing the metaphysical method, therefore, we must turn to the historical, and study mental phenomena as they appear in the actions of mankind at large. Mental progress is twofold, moral and intellectual, the first having relation to our duties, the second to our knowledge. It is a progress not of capacity, but in the circumstances under which capacity comes into play; not of internal power, but of external advantage. Now, whereas moral truths do not change, intellectual truths are constantly changing, from which we may infer that the progress of society is due, not to the moral knowledge, which is stationary, but to the intellectual knowledge, which is constantly advancing.
The history of any people will become more valuable for ascertaining the laws by which past events were governed in proportion as their movements have been least disturbed by external agencies. During the last three centuries these conditions have applied to England more than to any other country; since the action of the people has there been the least restricted by government, and has been allowed the greatest freedom of play. Government intervention is habitually restrictive, and the best legislation has been that which abrogated former restrictive legislation.
Government, religion, and literature are not the causes of civilisation, but its effects. The higher religion enters only where the mind is intellectually prepared for its acceptance; elsewhere the forms may be adopted, but not the essence, as mediæval Christianity was merely an adapted paganism. Similarly, a religion imposed by authority is accepted in its form, but not necessarily in its essence.
In the same way literature is valuable to a country in proportion as the population is capable of criticising and discriminating; that is, as it is intellectually prepared to select and sift the good from the bad.