ME. BUCKLE'S FALLACIES. 1 



IT has always been a favourite illusion that 

 social changes do not, like physical changes, 

 conform to fixed and ascertainable laws. Not 

 only is it that philosophers of a certain class 

 have, from the earliest times, explained histori- 

 cal events as instances of the continued interpo- 

 sition of an arbitrary power, exterior to and in- 

 dependent of the material universe ; not only is 

 it that thinkers of an opposite school have re- 

 ferred the actions of men to a no less arbitrary 

 power, operative in each individual as an ulti- 



1 As this review of Mr. Buckle's History of Civilisation was written 

 and published when I was only nineteen years old, I must not now be 

 held responsible for all the opinions expressed in it. The apparently 

 favourable estimate of Positivism which runs through it will best be 

 understood from the preceding article, which was written only four 

 years later, when my view of Comte was essentially the same. It 

 will be seen that I have never been, in any legitimate sense of the 

 word, a positivist. I have reproduced this article without altering a 

 single word; and have appended to it a "Postscript," written fifteen 

 years later, as an illustration of the change which Mr. Buckle's repur 

 tation has undergone. 



