CHAPTER XT. 



ADDITIONAL ELUCIDATIONS OF THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY. 



1. THE doctrine which the preceding chapters were 

 intended to enforce and elucidate that the collective series 

 of social phenomena, in other words the course of history, is 

 suhject to general laws, which philosophy may possibly detect 

 has been familiar for generations to the scientific thinkers of 

 the Continent, and has for the last quarter of a century passed 

 out of their peculiar domain, into that of newspapers and 

 ordinary political discussion. In our own country, however, 

 at the time of the first publication of this Treatise, it was 

 almost a novelty, and the prevailing habits of thought on his- 

 torical subjects were the very reverse of a preparation for it. 

 Since then a great change has taken place, and has been 

 eminently promoted by the important work of Mr. Buckle ; 

 who, with characteristic energy, flung down this great prin- 

 ciple, together with many striking exemplifications of it, into 

 the arena of popular discussion, to be fought over by a sort 

 of combatants, in the presence of a sort of spectators, who 

 would never even have been aware that there existed such 

 a principle if they had been left to learn its existence from the 

 speculations of pure science. And hence has arisen a consider- 

 able amount of controversy, tending not only to make the 

 principle rapidly familiar to the majority of cultivated minds, 

 but also to clear it from the confusions and misunderstandings 

 by which it was but natural that it should for a time be 

 clouded, and which impair the worth of the doctrine to those 

 who accept it, and are the stumbling-block of many who 

 do not. 



Among the impediments to the general acknowledgment, 

 by thoughtful minds, of the subjection of historical facts to 

 scientific laws, the most fundamental continues to be that 

 VOL. ii. 34 



