150 Darwinism and Other Essays. 



Thus far Mr. Buckle proceeds on safe ground : 

 but when he attempts, in his second fundamental 

 law, to go still further, and to determine how 

 much of our civilization is due to intellectual, 

 and how much to moral, progress, when he at- 

 tempts l to prove that the intellectual element in 

 our nature is advancing, while the moral element 

 is not, and that knowledge is the cause of progress, 

 while good intentions are not, he gets at once 

 into complicated difficulties; and his argument, 

 when stripped of its dazzling rhetoric, is so vague, 

 confused, and unsatisfactory that we cannot help 

 suspecting that the author has but an imperfect 

 comprehension of what he is arguing for. At the 

 outset, he makes an assertion directly contradic- 

 tory to the proposition which he is to prove. He 

 says, " There can be no doubt that a people are 

 not really advancing, if, on the one hand, their 

 increasing ability is accompanied by increasing 

 vice, or if, on the other hand, while they are be- 

 coming more virtuous they likewise become more 

 ignorant. This double movement, moral and in- 

 tellectual, is essential to the very idea of civiliza- 

 tion, and includes the entire theory of mental 

 progress." 2 Having thus unequivocally expressed 

 what we shall presently perceive to be in all prob- 



i Vol. i. chap. iv. 2 Vol. i. p. 159. 



