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 offered by the study of 
statistics, in which the Belgian Quetelet, whose book Sur ’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 Jaws, 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 
