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.