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Relation of Literature to Civilization.

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moral laws, he writes, is alone entitled to the name of knowledge, and literature has its uses in so far as it conserves or communicates that knowledge, but no further. Such knowledge does not belong to literature. Literature must receive it from society, and all it may do is to give back to society what it has borrowed from that source. What belongs to literature as such is often absurd, false, and mischievous, and the discernment which qualifies a man to see this material as it is cannot come from literature, it must come from knowledge, and knowledge must be derived from sources quite apart from literature. So does Mr. Buckle dispose of everything that has to do with imagination, sensibility, and taste of the æsthetic side of humanity entirely. Galileo and Bacon did something. To part with Milton, or even with Shakspeare, would be no great loss. If the works of such men prove nothing, they are nothing. We surely need say no more to expose this narrow and unhappy mode of estimating human nature. In fact, Mr. Buckle has nothing to do with man as man. That he may found theories on one part of human nature he virtually ignores every other part of it. He must have effects which are supposed to come from one single power of the soul. He has no taste for what is supposed to come from all its powers combined. The human intellect is a piece of machinery, operating according to law; but all beside in human nature is variable, so much disturbing force, to be regulated and subdued by one master force. The aim, accordingly, of this worship of intellect, is not towards harmony, but towards despotism. One faculty, without anything of taste, morality, or religion to guide it, is to have taste, morality, and religion wholly at its pleasure. We are aware that this language must sound like caricature. But there is no particle of caricature in it, if Mr. Buckle's maxims concerning the exclusive province of the intellect in the work of civilization be just. It is the sober truth. But what God has joined together no man can thus put asunder. The fullest development of humanity will not come from intellect alone, nor from moral, or religious, or æsthetic feeling taken alone. It must come from the conjoint action of all these. By the word consciousness, we do not mean any separate faculty of the mind, but the mind itself in the act we denote by that term. So by the word intuition, we do not mean any distinct power of the soul, nor any mere feeling, but an act of the mind which results more or less from the exercise of its general capacity and culture, whatever that may be. Even intuitive belief, accordingly, is belief for a reason, and intuitive feeling is feeling for a reason-though the combinations in the process which gives the basis of the reasonable at such moments, are much too subtle, and too intimately blended to

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gether, to be more than vaguely apprehended. From such acts of the mind we receive all the richer products of genius. In such products the mind of the gifted man is before us, not in the narrowness of a single faculty, but in its varied breadth and power. Humanity thus viewed is a noble instrument, made up of many parts, all capable of vibrating in the richest harmony, and of giving forth to the ear, not one ever-recurring note, but all the conceivable wonders of musical combinations. Or it may be compared to the face of nature, as it presents to the eye, not one colour only, but colours in all the vivid, and mellow, and exquisite blendings which the soul in its happiest moments can imagine. Such would humanity be as consecrated to its mission by genius and piety; and such will society be in the measure in which it shall come under such influences. From considerations of this nature, it is manifest that the man who insists that intellect alone ensures human civilization, gives us an effect including a multitude of elements which have no place in their alleged cause. Intellect, which, taken alone, has nothing properly human in it, no motive, still less any motive distinctive of humanity, is given as the power which makes humanity all that it is in the best estate in which it is known to us. Wonderful would it be if an effect could be found to include all this, while nothing of this nature is to be found in the source from which it proceeds. It is in vain to say Mr. Buckle cannot mean anything so absurd. He has said, in one form or another, that he means this, a hundred times in the course of this volume. We have cited his language, and have only added some of the consequences which are inseparable from the ground he has taken.

The notion that governments have a place among the causes favourable to civilization, seems to exhaust the last residuum of Mr. Buckle's patience. They-rulers-they advance civilization; why they have always been its great drag and impediment, and it is not in their nature that they should ever be anything else. They have nothing, save what the society out of which they have come has given them, and they never move except as they are propelled by society.

When Rousseau's Social Contract, and other works of that description, began to fill the imagination of weak people with pictures of man in his supposed state of nature, and in the supposed simplicity of the early settlements of the race, Edmund Burke took up this vein in his Vindication of Natural Society, and seemed to make out a capital case on the side of our return, without delay, to a life in wigwams and in the old forests. But what Mr. Burke wrote as an amusing satire, Mr. Buckle has written in sober earnest. Even concerning English history, he

Relation of Government to Civilization.

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writes, it may be broadly stated, that with the exception of 'certain necessary enactments respecting the preservation of order and the punishment of crime, nearly everything which 'has been done has been done amiss' (p. 254). Mr. Buckle admits that governments render service to society in so far as they preserve order and punish crime: but the blunders they have made, the good they have prevented, and the evil they have inflicted, swell up to so frightful an amount in his hands, that the natural inference seems to be, that as the evil which has come from this machinery so prodigiously outweighs the good, the sooner mankind are rid of it the better. The rhetoric which produces such an impression cannot be very philosophical.

Here, as on the preceding points, Mr. Buckle's argument rests upon a fallacy. It is supposed that the upper, or educated and ruling classes, know nothing save what they have learnt from the people below them, and so can never be in a condition to acquit themselves as teachers and leaders. This is supposed to be alike true of ministers of religion, of literary men, and of statesmen. But who does not see the error of this assumption? Why has Mr. Buckle published this bulky volume if he thinks he has nothing to say but what everybody knows? But if Mr. Buckle is in a condition fitly to take upon him the function of a teacher and a leader, why may not a goodly number of persons beside be quite as much warranted in doing so? Mr. Buckle hopes to aid civilization by writing a book about it, how is it that he alone is to have this hope from his labour? Legislation, we know, must not be too much in advance of public opinion; and it is for this reason that the politician often labours hard and long to bring public opinion up to the required level. Nothing can be more one-sided and unsatisfactory than the drift of Mr. Buckle's reasoning on this whole subject. One great principle, indeed, announced in this connexion we must cite:-'To main'tain order,' says Mr. Buckle, 'to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, and to adopt certain precautions respecting the 'public health, are the only services which any government can render to the interests of civilization.' (pp. 257, 258.) There are some members of Parliament, some literary men, and some ministers of religion, who understand this truth, but these advanced men will have to school the opinion of the public for some time longer before that will be made to apprehend this doctrine. In short, what Mr. Buckle himself says as to the effect produced by the publication of the Wealth of Nations, destroys the entire mass of his reasoning on this subject at a stroke.

So much for the nostrum which says that the labours of the politician, of the literary man, and of the religious teacher,

have no place among the causes of social progress; and so much for the philosophy which assures us that we cannot have either a morality or a theology worth possessing, except as it comes to us through such channels as the invention of gunpowder, the progress of political economy, and the locomotive applications of steam! In fact, nothing can be more manifest than that individual men, in all the departments of intelligent labour, while themselves products of their age, do often powerfully affect their age, and ages to come; and that as individual men do unquestionably exist who possess high scientific knowledge, and are very low in morals, so it may be with communities; and where morality is wanting, even Mr. Buckle confesses that one of the elements inseparable from our idea of civilization is wanting.

But if Mr. Buckle cannot place religion, literature, or government, among the causes of social progress, he can assign influences of the most potent description to the disposition to look very sceptically at all current opinions in those departments. We must repeat, however, that Mr. Buckle uses the word scepticism in a sense of his own. As this is a point of importance we shall allow him to explain himself upon it. In a note to page 327 he writes:

'It has been suggested to me by an able friend, that there is a class of persons who will misunderstand this expression; and that there is another class who, without misunderstanding it, will intentionally misrepresent its meaning. Hence it may be well to state distinctly what I wish to convey by the word 'scepticism.' By scepticism I merely mean hardness of belief; so that an increased scepticism is an increased perception of the difficulty of proving assertions; or, in other words, it is an increased application, and an increased diffusion, of the rule of reasoning, and of the laws of evidence. The feeling of hesitation and suspended judgment has, in every department of thought, been the invariable preliminary to all the intellectual revolutions through which the human mind has passed; and without it there could be no progress, no change, no civilization. In physics, it is the necessary precursor of science; in politics, of liberty; in theology, of toleration. These are the three leading forms of scepticism; it is clear, therefore, that in religion, the sceptic steers a middle course between atheism and orthodoxy, rejecting both extremes, because he sees that both are incapable of proof.'

In illustration and in support of this doctrine a review is taken of English history from the revival of letters to the time of George III. We have a few remarks to make on this section of the work-we regret that they must be so brief.

Mr. Buckle could not use the word 'scepticism' in this large, unusual, and ambiguous sense, without conveying the impression

Scepticism-its Relation to Progress.

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which he tells us he does not intend to convey. His praise of scepticism, however, is so applied as to include scepticism in its bad-its irreligious sense, as well as in its harmless, or its wholesome signification. Of course, he is aware that scepticism, good as it is in its general tendency, may become excessive, and so become injurious. But it must go very far before it would come under that description in Mr. Buckle's estimation. His great fear is for the credulity of mankind; he has scarcely a fear for the opposite tendency. He must not assume that by using the word 'scepticism' with so wide a meaning, no one will have a right to accuse him of using it in its bad meaning. He has used it with a bad meaning as well as with a good one; and by using it in a double sense, can hardly fail to convey the impres sion that the effects which follow from it in its better sense, belong to it in the worse. Men to whom the principles of morality and religion are grave matters, may well complain of a course of argument which seems to aim at concealing gross assaults upon those principles under a specious phraseology.

Further, it does not seem to be remembered by Mr. Buckle that scepticism implies something anterior to itself—a state of mind which has given it existence. In the human mind, belief or doubt must be belief or doubt for a reason. We are thus led back to motive and to a moral nature. But if it be true that, without scepticism there could be 'no progress, no change, no civilization; and if without moral motive-the motive we call the love of truth-there would be no scepticism, how comes it to pass that scepticism is to go for almost everything in the march of civilization, and moral motive for nothing? Strange that, in an estimate of forces, the power produced should be so fully recognised, and the power producing that power be utterly ignored. The moment this oversight is detected, it becomes obvious that all Mr. Buckle's learning and eloquence on this subject is so much wasted strength. When all has been said about scepticism as the invariable preliminary to all the intellectual revolutions through which the human mind has passed,' we have a right to add-Be it so; but a motiveless scepticism is inconceivable; the motive, in this case, must be a moral motive; and as it is impossible to conceive of a virtuous scepticism without virtue as its cause, the primary and grand spring of the world's progress manifestly has its root, not in a certain condition of the intellect, but in the improved moral feeling from which that condition of the intellect comes. So the way to make the world wiser comes to be, after all, the old-fashioned one to which we have most of us been familiar-namely, that we should make it better. That the ethical feeling of society may become

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