644 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



CHAPTER XI. 



ADDITIONAL ELUCIDATIONS OF THE SCIENCE OP 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 subject to general laws, which philosophy may pos- 

 sibly 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 dis- 

 cussion. 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 historical 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 enei'gy, flung 

 down this great principle, together with many striking exemplifications of 

 it, into the arena of popular discussion, to be fought over by a sort of com- 

 batants, 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 considerable amount of controversy, tending not only to make the prin- 

 ciple 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 fun- 

 damental continues to be that which is grounded on the doctrine of Free 

 Will, or, in other words, on the denial that the law of invariable Causation 

 holds true of human volitions ; for if it does not, the course of history, being 

 the result of human volitions, can not be a subject of scientific laws, since 

 the volitions on which it depends can neither be foreseen, nor reduced to 

 any canon of regularity even after they have occurred. I have discussed 

 this question, as far as seemed suitable to the occasion, in a former chapter ; 

 and I only think it necessary to repeat, that the doctrine of the Causation 

 of human actions, improperly called the doctrine of Necessity, affirms no 

 mysterious nexus, or overruling fatality : it asserts only that men's actions 

 are the joint result of the general laws and circumstances of human na- 

 ture, and of their own particular characters ; those characters again being 

 the consequence of the natural and artificial circumstances that constituted 

 their education, among which circumstances must be reckoned their own 

 conscious efforts. Any one who is willing to take (if the expression may 

 be permitted) the trouble of thinking himself into the doctrine as thus 

 stated, will find it, I believe, not only a faithful interpretation of the uni- 

 versal experience of human conduct, but a correct representation of the 

 mode in which he himself, in every particular case, spontaneously interprets 

 his own experience of that conduct. 



But if this principle is true of individual man, it must be true of collect- 



