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HENRY BUCKLE

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