pillars of their Church and State. Of the refined minority, those who hesitate at heart between the liberal creed and Ultramontane sympathies turn scornfully from his samplers of excellence to the Acta Sanctorum.' Our apostles of culture, intensifying his moral, repudiate his artistic blemishes; they agree with him in theoretically despising plain facts and plain men, and, unlike him, they carry their theory into practice; but their views of style are hopelessly at variance. The later followers of Bentham, whom he has never fairly appreciated, recognise him only as an ill-informed adversary. Yet the time has come when well-educated Englishmen of all sects ought frankly to acknowledge the high qualities of a mind, on the whole the loftiest that the world of letters in New England has hitherto produced. In memory of these qualities the thoughts of his countrymen will continue, with or without the sanction of foreigners, to revert, with respect and gratitude, to the oldfashioned village straggling through the meadows, where the Assabeth unites with the Musketaquid to creep towards the sea, famous as the first battle-field of the Revolutionary War, and as the birthplace of American Transcendentalism. ART. IV. History of Civilisation in England. By HENRY New Edition. THE opening volume of Mr. Buckle's History contains a striking chapter on the relative effect of Moral and Intellectual Laws, which, when the book first appeared, was most inadequately discussed, and which, since that time, has received too little attention. After reviewing the influence of natural agencies upon man, Mr. Buckle came to the effect of man's power over nature, and, surveying the career of nations, he held the progress of the race to be twofold,-Moral and Intellectual; the first having more immediate relation to our duties, the second to our knowledge.' The problem then arose, Which of these elements was the chief? If it was the Moral, then the Moral element must mark the advance of society; if it was the Intellectual, then the Intellectual element must be the standard of measurement. Now, said the historian, neither the moral nor the intellectual faculties grow in strength as the world grows in years. There is no reason to believe that the children who were born in London in 1860 were a whit more richly endowed by nature than those who were born in London a hundred or a thousand years before; nor, whatever height future generations may reach in purity of life and mental attainments, is there any reason to believe that the native power of the race will undergo a corresponding change. Thus progress is the result, not of internal vigour, but of external advantages. That is to say, it is the result of the surrounding opinions, knowledge, associations,-in a word, the entire mental atmosphere.' That atmosphere is made up of two elements, the Moral and the Intellectual, one stationary, the other progressive. Moral teaching makes no advance. 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 neighbour as yourself; to forgive your enemies; to restrain your passions; to honour 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." The province of the intellect, on the other hand, presents nothing but change, nothing but progress. Every age 1 History, pp. 163-4. adds its experience to that of all past time; century by century the mass of recorded facts increases in geometrical ratio; new methods of inquiry take the place of old; new systems of thought are ever springing up; new sciences are ever coming to life; so that the physical and chemical knowledge possessed even by the greatest minds of antiquity is trivial when compared with that taught to an advanced schoolboy of our own time. Here, then, we have two agencies, one stationary, the other progressive. But civilisation is constantly advancing; and, since a stationary agent can bring forth only a stationary effect, moral systems cannot, said Mr. Buckle, be the agencies of which we are in search, and the progress of society must result from the intellect alone. These conclusions,' he added in his own emphatic way, are no doubt very unpalatable; and what makes them peculiarly offensive, is, that it is impossible to refute them.' Such was the historian's argument; and we have stated it as clearly as we are able, because, while we hold it to be vitiated by a fundamental error, we believe that, indirectly, it sets the essential character of moral systems in a more vivid light than any other bit of recent speculation. Next to a book at once full of ability and of truth, the most valuable is a book at once full of ability and of error; since its power gives a stimulus to thought of which a feeble work is incapable, and opens up prospects of which the writer did not dream. Such is emphatically the case with much of Buckle's History, one of the faultiest, and yet one of the greatest books of this generation; and, as we mean to subject the logic of his ethical chapter to the most hostile criticism, we pay at the outset a tribute of admiration to those splendid powers and that matchless industry which have given him a lasting name. For the moment, we admit that moral teaching is not progressive. Most, if not all, of the precepts in the Christian ethics are to be found scattered throughout the literature of ancient nations. The poetry of every people puts forth stray jets of moral wisdom. When the Spanish missionaries first carried the gospel into Mexico, they found that, though cut off from the civilisation and the religion of Europe, the Aztecs possessed ethical maxims befitting a Christian pulpit. Centuries before the Jesuits went to China, Confucius had proclaimed the golden rule of doing unto others as we would that others should do unto us. The Arabs and the Persians have a proverbial literature, which, to much that is meaningless, stupid, and grovelling, adds much that is stamped with the loftiest moral wisdom. Thousands of years ago, the Hindoos possessed a sublime body of ethical truth. The subtle intellects of the people are pecu liarly fitted for speculation, and when Europe was still a barbarous waste, they were studying the very problems which are still perplexing Western thinkers. The freedom of the will, the relation between mind and matter, the dependence of cause and effect, the immortality of the soul, and the nature of Deity, all these problems have been made familiar to the Hindoos by the meditation of unnumbered ages; so that, when they come to read Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hamilton, Comte, or Mill, they manifest little surprise, they easily master what is new, and they show that some of the profoundest speculations of the West were anticipated by their own race. In like manner, they have achieved much in ethics. They have no Sermon on the Mount; but their poets have said, in other words, much of what our Lord enunciated in that sublimest of discourses. In the Western world the ethical mine is still more rich. As gifted with logical power as with imagination, as fitted for scientific analysis as for poetic flight, the Greeks early reached some of the noblest of moral truths. Those truths were often stifled, distorted, misunderstood, ridiculed, seldom put in practice, never thoroughly carried out; yet they were ever breaking through the hard crust of human life. It was the same in Judea before the birth of Christ. Even among the most exclusive of peoples, the culture of heathen nations had diffused a subtle atmosphere, which acted as a solvent on the old code of morality; and their altered sympathies and longings found expression in a mass of proverbs breathing the very spirit of Christian love. Nor does that fact take away from the originality of the Sermon on the Mount, any more than the fact that Christ did not use a new grammar or new forms of rhetoric. In a certain sense, therefore, Buckle is right in saying that there has been little advance in morals within the last three thousand years. But that admission does not take us far; since 1 in this respect the progress of intellectual truths has been equally small. It is only the statement of the chief ethical maxims that does not change. It is only the statement of the commands, 'Do as you would be done by;' 'Love your enemies;' 'Bless them that curse you;' 'Honour your father and your mother,' that we have not been able to improve. And what are the corresponding intellectual truths? Such precepts as these: To gain a knowledge of Nature, you must watch her movements, use experiments, observe cautiously, put absolute trust in no theory which goes beyond the facts you have ascertained, and employ hypotheses only as a means of hitting upon Nature's secrets,-only as picklocks to unfasten a door of which you cannot find the key. Those are the great maxims of scientific research; they strike the inductive and the deductive note; and the history of science is only the history of their application and development. Now, what advance has been made in the formal statement of those great principles? In one sense, none whatever; and that is just the sense which Buckle has in view. Take the three greatest masters of scientific method that the world has ever seen, Aristotle, Bacon, and Descartes. Aristotle laid down as clearly as any modern the truth that science must be built on observation; that her survey must take in all the facts of the case; and that whatever theory went beyond those facts was but a guess. Two thousand years afterwards Descartes wrote his Discourse on Method, and that book was among the boldest pieces of writing that had appeared for centuries. Yet, in telling men to study Nature, the great French teacher did not, and could not, go beyond the rule of his mighty forerunner,-the rule that we must fit our theories to our facts, not our facts to our theories; the rule that the first duty of science was to use her eyes. Nor did Bacon say more than that. He said that we must observe and experiment, that we must watch Nature patiently and humbly, and that we must rise from particular instances to general laws. But, in substance, the Greek had said the same things before. No doubt, between the method of Aristotle and the method of Bacon there is a great change, marking an equally great advance; and what that advance is we shall presently ask; but meanwhile the fact to be noted is, that in Buckle's sense of the term, intellectual principles have made as little. progress as moral. So far, both stand on the same level. Nor is this all. In casting a slight on ethical systems, the historian might have gone further, and have said that there never was a time at which the highest precepts of the Christian morality were not practised in a fitful kind of way. He might have said that since the New Testament expresses the highest dictates of our nature, those dictates must have been carried into practice by a multitude of pure beings before they were crystallized into ethical maxims. He might have said that savages are sometimes kind to the helpless, sometimes meek, sometimes merciful, on rare occasions forgiving. He might have pointed out that it does not follow, because a tribe or a people is cruel, revengeful, and bloodthirsty, that therefore all its members are cruel, revengeful, and bloodthirsty too. He might have said all this; but, had he done so, he must have said more; for the same things hold equally good of scientific principles. The practice of induction and deduction is as old as man himself. The methods by which science rises to a knowledge of the sublimest laws have in every age been applied in every hour of life; and |