Effects attributed to the Aspects of Nature.

13

would never have invaded it for the purpose of becoming rich. Now it is admitted that this commercial element, which has proved powerful enough to make southern Asia wealthy and comparatively intelligent, has not hitherto been powerful enough to make it free, even in the Oriental sense of freedom. But who will venture to say that what has not been done by this influence in the past may not be done by it in the future? Ten centuries have passed since the last northern inundation on Europe. May not the same change come in Asia, and contemporary with the ceasing of such external disturbances may there not be such a diffusion of the elements of a better civilization from Europe as will suffice to give to Asia in the time to come an aspect unknown to the past? The signs which seem to bespeak the approach of such a change are many. Writing concerning India, Egypt, Mexico, and Peru, Mr. Buckle says: there have been generated among them those habits of tame and servile submission, by 'which, as we learn from history, they have always been charac'terized. For it is an undoubted fact that their annals furnish 'no instance of their having turned upon their rulers, no war of classes, no popular insurrections, not even one great popular conspiracy. (p. 73.) These sentences were going through the press while our great Indian mutiny was brewing. So is prophecy often confounded by history when the prophecy comes from no higher source than the inspiration of philosophy.

But if Mr. Buckle's speculations concerning the influence of climate and soil are found to consist in very wide conclusions drawn from very narrow premises, this is still more the case with his reasoning concerning the influence of what are called the Aspects of Nature.' His theory on this point is thus stated :

'So far as natural phenomena are concerned, it is evident that whatever inspires feelings of terror, or of great wonder, and whatever excites in the mind an idea of the vague and uncontrollable, has a special tendency to influence the imagination, and to bring under its dominion the slower and more deliberate operations of the understanding. In such cases, Man, contrasting himself with the force and majesty of Nature, becomes painfully conscious of his own insignificance. A sense of inferiority steals over him. From every quarter innumerable obstacles hem him in, and limit his individual will. His mind, appalled by the indefined and the indefinable, hardly cares to scrutinize the details of which such imposing grandeur consists. On the other hand, where the works of Nature are small and feeble, Man regains confidence: he seems more able to rely on his own power; he can, as it were, pass through and exercise authority in every direction. And as the phenomena are more accessible, it becomes easier for him to experiment upon them, or to observe them with minuteness: an inquisitive and analytic spirit is encouraged, and he is tempted to generalize the ap

pearances of Nature, and refer them to the laws by which they are governed.' 'It is in this way that the old tropical civilizations had to struggle with innumerable difficulties unknown to the temperate zone, where European civilization has long flourished. The devastations of animals hostile to man, the ravages of hurricanes, tempests, earthquakes, and similar perils, constantly pressed upon them, and affected the tone of their natural character.'-pp. 109, 110, 114.

Now we are not prepared to deny that where such natural phenomena exist it is easy to suppose that some such impression may be made by them. But there are two points which deserve consideration. First, the phenomena described are comparatively local; only a small portion of the tropical populations could possibly be affected by them and in the second place, the bad influence which Mr. Buckle attributes to them is not their only influence. The Sudra caste of India seem to be Mr. Buckle's favourite type of the Asiatic character. But what proportion of that class can be supposed to have had the least familiarity with the grander scenes of nature ? True, there are the sublime Himalaya mountains-but those mountains are placed as the great wall between the vast peninsula of Hindostan and the remote lands of Tartary and Mongolia. The Himalayas have exerted no more influence on nine-tenths of the people of Hindostan than the Pyrenees or the Alps may be said to have exerted on the Dutch or the Norwegians. The same may be said of the Tauric mountains in their relation to the populations of the plains watered by the Indus, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. In Egypt, the appearances of the country include little to affect the imagination in any way, yet all the effects attributed by Mr. Buckle to what is not there, are found there. In Peru it is different. There the grand in nature not only exists, but has existed in close juxtaposition with the people. We may therefore conjecture-though we do not know it-that the influence from this source among the Peruvians was considerable. But it thus appears that over the tropical countries generally, the things which remain to inspire a special terror, are for the most part wild beasts, hurricanes, and earthquakes; and that the superstitions existing in those countries, with all the effects resulting from them, should be attributed wholly, or even mainly, to such influences, is in our judgment something almost incredible as coming from a philosopher. Assuredly we have here another huge conclusion founded on premises by no means adequate to sustain it. How the gods of Greece came to be so much more human than the gods of the orientalists, though as Herodotus tells us they were borrowed from them, is a topic which has tasked the ingenuity of some eminent scholars. The result of

Effects attributed to the Aspects of Nature.

15

their speculations is not very satisfactory, and we are far indeed from thinking that Mr. Buckle has solved the problem by reminding us that the mountains and plains and rivers are smaller in Greece than in Asia. Some people have the grace to be thankful for small mercies, and a philosopher with a theory is often one of the most grateful of mortals for the smallest contribution that may be made in support of it.

But it is not only true that Mr. Buckle ascribes to the Aspects of Nature' in tropical countries a greater amount of bad influence than can be reasonably attributed to them, the very phenomena he describes are often productive of good influences of which he makes no mention. The sublime heights and passes of the Tauric and Himalaya mountains may awaken the kind of awe which renders the mind susceptible of religious, and it may be of superstitious, impressions. But while Mr. Buckle is discoursing about the vastness of nature in such regions as compelling man to feel his littleness, and as thus schooling him through awe into abjectness, one cannot but call to mind the notorious fact that the manhood of mountaineers, in place of being everywhere a dwarfed and timid thing, has been everywhere a manhood of the most buoyant and daring description. It was from those very heights and passes of which we have spoken, that the brave and skilful men of war descended from time to time into the fertile plains of the south, and having become victors have founded empires. The regions in which the people should, according to Mr. Buckle's theory, be scared and enfeebled the most by the phantoms of superstition, are the regions in which they throw fear of that sort and every other most to the winds. In place of finding the special weakness of the Asiatic character where such influences prevail, it somehow happens that it is there we find its strength.

The truth is, this whole subject-the influence of physical laws on national character is a very complex, a very intricate, and altogether a very difficult affair. The effects of those laws are so diverse, and the many causes which modify their action are so subtle in their working, that not only the learning, but the judgment necessary to reach any certain conclusion in respect to it are such as to discourage and almost to forbid investigation. Mr. Buckle has no faith in a providence in the scriptural and real sense of that term. The Creator, if there be one, has placed man and the universe face to face, and there he has left them. The chief end of man is to use mental laws so as to understand, and as far as possible to control physical laws. It is natural that a man whose belief is of this sort should endeavour to make the best of his isolated and forlorn condition, studying to know

whatever his knowing faculties may reveal to him, seeing he can hope for nothing higher. In this spirit Mr. Buckle proceeds to his task-not so John Milton :

And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer

Before all temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast abyss,

And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine; what is low, raise and support;
That to the height of this great argument

I

may assert eternal Providence,

And justify the ways of God to men.'

We regret the total absence of this reverential temper in the volume before us. Nature being Mr. Buckle's only source of light, he has expected much from it-more than he has realized. As if in rebuke of his presumption his every second step is left to be a false one. He would resolve all the moral mysteries of existence into merely natural laws, and then say that is enough. Poor humanity-this is but a sorry gospel for thee!

We naturally shrink from a doctrine which makes the degraded state of any portion of our race the result of laws 'utterly impossible to resist' (p. 73). But Mr. Buckle finds laws of this description not only in hot countries, but equally in cold countries, and accounts almost everything as being in their hands even in the most temperate regions. Everywhere the forces of nature seem to be not so much for man as against him. The two come together, not so much to agree, as to be in perpetual strife. In some instances man seems not to struggle wholly in vain, but much more commonly he is vanquished, prostratedmiserably prostrated, and there is no help for him. But in all his abjectness he has his pleasing illusions-one especially. He thinks he is a free agent. It is a fond mistake. There are social laws which determine the amount of crime, the amount of suicide, and the amount of everything bad in any given state of society. Opposed to these general forces individual effort accomplishes nothing. The average of the obnoxious comes notwithstanding. To most of our readers this will be a hard saying. But is it true? We think not, and we have shown in part why we so think. We hold with those philosophers who regard the doctrine of the freedom of the will as a doctrine which-like the existence of an external world-can never be either proved or disproved. It must, however, be assumed as a postulate, if we are to have moral distinctions, a moral law, and a moral Ruler. It is the necessary relation of this truth to all higher truth that

Necessity versus Freedom.

17

gives us our nearest approach to proof concerning it. Opposed to this view come Mr. Buckle's statistics-so many suicides, and so many crimes, in a given time, and in given circumstances. How could this be from year to year, he inquires, except by means of a law which is not to be disturbed by individual volitions? But the question to be determined is-were the individuals who make up those averages compelled so to do? That a certain number of men in a certain community will be offenders may be predicted, but that certain persons will surely be of that number, that cannot be predicted. So that there is a superficial view that may be taken of this subject, such as is presented in Mr. Buckle's statistics; and there is a deeper view that may be taken of it, and one which statistics can never be made to comprehend. And who can presume to say that the superficial view, which seems to favour the doctrine of necessity, may not be counterbalanced by the profounder elements which as certainly belong to this problem? How certain men have come to have a place in the category of offenders, while others whose antecedents seemed not long since to be no more favourable are not in it, is a question which no statistical tables, and no doctrine of chances, can answer; and until that question is answered the point of individual liberty is untouched. With us it is not a small matter that in accepting Mr. Buckle's doctrine we should feel bound to surrender the foundation, not only of morality, but of religion. No place would be consistently left for either. But we are not obliged to accept it. Its consequences warrant the firmest persuasion as to its falsehood. It will soon be found that it is God, and not Destiny that is above us after all; and that the necessity laid on man that he should account himself a free agent, and that men should so account each other, is not a great lie, a lie which the Creator knows to be such, but with which he has not known how to dispense in attempting to set up a moral government!

We now come to the next great principle in Mr. Buckle's argument-viz., that all the progress possible to humanity must come from its progressive knowledge concerning physical and mental laws. It is, of course, admitted that civilization supposes virtue as well as knowledge. But the effects of moral feeling, as it has hitherto existed among men, have been so variable and contradictory, as to be self-neutralizing. Moral feeling is thus made to be so dependent on knowledge, as to be in itself only a part of the civilization which comes purely and altogether from knowledge.

But before entering on this topic, Mr. Buckle endeavours to put all our psychologists out of court in regard to matters of