534 Darwinism and History 



9. The hypothesis of general laws operative in history was carried 

 further in a book which appeared in England twenty years later and 

 exercised an influence in Europe far beyond its intrinsic merit, 

 Buckle's History of Civilization in England (1857 — 61). Buckle 

 owed much to Comte, and followed him, or rather outdid him, in 

 regarding intellect as the most important factor conditioning the 

 upward development of man, so that progress, according to him, 

 consisted in the victory of the intellectual over the moral laws. 



10. The tendency of Comte and Buckle to assimilate history to 

 the sciences of nature by reducing it to general "laws," derived 

 stimulus and plausibility from the vista oifered by the study of 

 statistics, in which the Belgian Quetelet, whose book Sur I'homme 

 appeared in 1835, discerned endless possibilities. The astonishing 

 uniformities which statistical inquiry disclosed led to the belief that 

 it was only a question of collecting a sufficient amount of statistical 

 material, to enable us to predict how a given social group will act in 

 a particular case. Bourdeau, a disciple of this school, looks forward 

 to the time when historical science will become entirely quantitative. 

 The actions of prominent individuals, which are generally considered 

 to have altered or determined the course of things, are obviously 

 not amenable to statistical computation or explicable by general 

 laws. Thinkers like Buckle sought to minimise their importance or 

 explain them away. 



11. These indications may suffice to show that the new efforts to 

 interpret history which marked the first half of the nineteenth 

 century were governed by conceptions closely related to those which 

 were current in the field of natural science and which resulted in the 

 doctrine of evolution. The genetic principle, progressive development, 

 general laws, the significance of time, the conception of society as an 

 organic aggregate, the metaphysical theory of history as the self- 

 evolution of spirit, — all these ideas show that historical inquiry had 

 been advancing independently on somewhat parallel lines to the 

 sciences of nature. It was necessary to bring this out in order to 

 appreciate the influence of Darwinism. 



12. In the course of the dozen years which elapsed between the 

 appearances of The Origin of Species (observe that the first volume 

 of Buckle's work was published just two years before) and of The 

 Descent of Man (1871), the hypothesis of Lamarck that man is the 

 co-descendant with other species of some lower extinct form was 

 admitted to have been raised to the rank of an established fact by 

 most thinkers whose brains were not working under the constraint of 

 theological authority. 



One important effect of the discovery of this fact (I am not 

 speaking now of the Darwinian explanation) was to assign to history 



