ILLUSTRATIONS AND CRITICISMS 



intelligent organisms in a community. And it 

 includes and justifies all the minor generaliza- 

 tions which may be reached by a direct induc- 

 tion from historical phenomena solely. 



This law of progress we find to be exceed- 

 ingly abstract — it expresses a general truth 

 quite completely disengaged from the incidents 

 of particular cases. Such, as we were led to an- 

 ticipate, must be the character of a law which 

 generalizes a vast number of complex pheno- 

 mena. A formula which is to include in one 

 expression phenomena so different as the rise 

 of Christianity and the invention of the steam- 

 engine must needs be eminently abstract. To 

 attempt to make it concrete, so as to appeal 

 directly to the historical imagination, would be 

 to deprive it of its universality, to increase its 

 power of expressing some one set of phenomena 

 by rendering it powerless to express some other 

 equally important set. This consideration ex- 

 plains the manifest failure of all the attempts 

 which have been made to determine the general 

 law of progress by a simple historical induction. 

 Take, for example, the two crude generaliza- 

 tions which pretty nearly sum up the philoso- 

 phy of history as it is contained in the work of 

 Mr. Buckle, — that "scepticism " is uniformly 

 favourable to progress, while the " protective 

 spirit " (or, the spirit of over-legislation) is uni- 

 formly detrimental to it. These, in the first 



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