SCIENCE OF HISTORY. 



6o7 



to compensate for whatever may be 

 its inherent inconveniences or disad- 

 vantages, and to guard against the 

 dangers or accidents to which our 

 species is exposed from the necessary 

 incidents of its progression. Such 

 practical instnictions, founded on the 

 highest branch of speculative socio- 

 logy, will form the noblest and most 

 beneficial portion of the Political Art. 



That of this science and art even 

 the foundations are but beginning to 

 be laid is sufficiently evident. But 

 the superior minds are fairly turning 

 themselves towards that object. It 

 has become the aim of really scien- 

 tific thinkers to connect by theories 

 the facts of universal history : it is 

 acknowledged to be one of the requi- 

 sites of a general system of social 

 doctrine that it should explain, so 

 far as the data exist, the main facts 

 of history ; and a Philosophy of His- 

 tory is generally admitted to be at 

 once the verification and the initial 

 form of the Philosophy of the Pro- 

 gress of Society. 



If the endeavours now making in 

 all the more cultivated nations, and 

 beginning to be made even in Eng- 

 land, (usually the last to enter into 

 the general movement of the Euro- 

 pean mind,) for the construction of a 

 Philosophy of History, shall be di- 

 rected and controlled by those views 

 of the nature of sociological evidence 

 which I have (very briefly and im- 

 perfectly) attempted to characterise, 

 they cannot fail to give birth to a 

 sociological system widely removed 

 from the vague and conjectural char- 

 acter of all former attempts, and 

 worthy to take its place, at last, 

 among the sciences. When this 

 time shall come, no important branch 

 of human affairs will be any longer 

 abandoned to empiricism and un- 

 scientific surmise ; the circle of hu- 

 man knowledge will be complete, and 

 it can only thereafter receive further 

 enlargement by perpetual expansion 

 from within. 



CHAPTER XL 



ADDITIONAL ELUCIDATIONS OF THE 

 SCIENCE OF HISTORY. 



§ I. The doctrine which the pre- 

 ceding chapters were intended to en- 

 force and elucidate — that the collec- 

 tive series of social phenomena, in 

 other words, the course of history, is 

 subject to general laws, which philo- 

 sophy may possibly detect — has been 

 familiar for generations to the scien- 

 tific 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 pre- 

 vailing 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 char- 

 acteristic energy, 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 combatants 

 in the presence of a sort of specta- 

 tors, who would never even have been 

 aware that there existed such a prin- 

 ciple 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 misunder- 

 standings 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 thought- 

 ful minds, of the subjection of his- 

 torical facts to scientific laws, the 

 most fundamental continues to be 



