Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. 197 



ing in Egypt; Babylonia, Persia, and many ot 

 the other nations above-mentioned made consider- 

 able progress; India even arrived at a high state 

 of refinement, as is witnessed by her extensive and 

 magnificent literature. All this shows that in 

 early times progress did co-exist with the strongest 

 possible manifestation of the protective spirit ; 

 and when we consider that there was nothing then 

 to counterbalance the workings of the protective 

 spirit, that all physical causes contributed to fa- 

 vour its development, 1 and that scepticism, the 

 only thing that could have weakened it, did not 

 exist, we may suspect that the protective spirit 

 could not have been so detrimental to the interests 

 of civilization as Mr. Buckle supposes. 



On looking at the matter deductively, it will 

 even appear that without the protective spirit 

 there could have been no civilization. For what 

 but the most absolute despotism and the pro- 

 foundest awe of the ruling power could ever have 

 kept together the communities of the primitive 

 men, with their cannibalism, their bloodthirsti- 

 ness, their dishonesty and treachery ? As long as 

 men could not live together peaceably, as long 

 as they neither knew nor practised the first prin- 

 ciples of morality, there must have been some 



1 Buckle, vol. i. chap. 2. 



