736 1LTE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



which they are forced to follow, and the habits of thought which they 

 display, that he undertook to tell the end of a nation from the begin- 

 ning. Spain was no mystery to him when he remembered that it had 

 originally been a country of volcanoes ; that the people had conse- 

 quently been filled with a dread of the unseen and inscrutable power 

 which reveals itself in convulsions of the earth ; that their diseased 

 fear of shadowy influences made them resent the teachings of science, 

 and hence left them an easy prey to the Holy Office and Ignatius 

 Loyola when Luther, Calvin, and Zwingle, drew away from sacerdotal- 

 ism all the Christianity of Northern Europe. There can be no doubt 

 that Buckle's theory did rest on a basis of truth, and that it erred 

 simply by trying to account for every thing. In fact, it is not spe- 

 cially his doctrine, but simply the rigid and systematized application 

 of a princij3le which is as old as speculative curiosity. We apply it 

 every day of our lives. If a family go into a badly-drained house, 

 we say the chances are that they will have typhus, diarrhoea, or chol- 

 era. If a rich and foolish young man bets largely on the turf, the prob- 

 ability is that he will be ruined. And the statistician comes to help 

 us with a set of tables which throw uncomfortable light on the me- 

 chanical character of those mental and moral processes which might 

 seem to be determined by the unprompted bidding of our own wills. 

 Mr. Buckle was no doubt beguiled by a mere dream when he fancied 

 that we could account for every turn and winding in the history of a 

 country if we had only a large knowledge of its general conditions, 

 such as the temperature of the land, the qualities of the soil, the food 

 of the people, and their relations to their neighbors. He paid too 

 little heed to subtle qualities of race, and he did not make sufficient 

 allowance for the disturbing force of men gifted with extraordinary 

 power of brain and will. Still it is a mere truism that the more cor- 

 rectly and fully we know the general condition of a country, the more 

 does mystery vanish from its history, and the successive events tend 

 to take their place in orderly sequence. 



It is impossible, however, to prophesy by rule, and such system- 

 mongers as Mr. Buckle would be the most treacherous of all oracles. 

 Their hard and fast canons will not bend into the subtle crevices of 

 human life. Men who are so ostentatiously logical that they cannot 

 do a bit of thinking without the aid of a huge apparatus of sharply- 

 cut principles always lack a keen scent for truth. They blunder by 

 rule when less showy people find their way by mother-wit. Hence 

 they are the worst of all prophets. It was not by counting up how 

 many things tell in one way, and how many tell in another, that Heine 

 and De Tocqueville were able to guess correctly what was coming, but 

 by watching the chief currents of the age, or, as more homely folk 

 would say, by finding out which way the wind was blowing. They 

 had to deeide which among many social, religious, or political forces 

 were the strongest, and which would be the most lasting. They had 



