108 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 



He summarizes his conclusions in the first part of Chapter III 

 and brings out so clearly the contrast between passive and active 

 adaptation that portions may well be given. 



Looking at the history of the world as a whole, the tendency has been, in 

 Europe, to subordinate nature to man; out of Europe, to subordinate man 

 to nature. ... It suggests the important consideration, that if we would 

 understand, for instance, the history of India, we must make the external 

 world our first study, because it has influenced man more than man has 

 influenced it. If, on the other hand, we would understand the history of a 

 country like France or England we must make man our principal study, 

 because nature being comparatively weak, every step in the great progress 

 has increased the dominion of the human mind over the agencies of the ex- 

 ternal world. Even in those countries where the power of man has reached 

 the highest point, the pressure of nature is still immense, but it diminishes 

 in each succeeding generation, because our increasing knowledge enables us 

 not so much to control nature, as to foretell her movements, and thus obviate 

 many of the evils she would otherwise occasion. . . . All around us are the 

 traces of this glorious and successful struggle. Indeed it seems as if in 

 Europe there was nothing man feared to attempt. The invasions of the sea 

 repelled, and whole provinces, as in the case of Holland, rescued from its 

 grasp; mountains cut through and turned into level roads; soils of the most 

 obstinate sterility becoming exuberant, from the mere advance of chemical 

 knowledge; while, in regard to electric phenomena, we see the subtlest, the 

 most rapid, and the most mysterious of all forces, made the medium of 

 thought and obeying even the most capricious behests of the human mind. 

 . . . Formerly the richest countries were those in which nature was most 

 bountiful; now the richest countries are those in which man is most active. 

 . . . From these facts it may be fairly inferred that the advance of Euro- 

 pean civilization is characterized by a diminishing influence of physical laws, 

 and an increasing influence of mental laws. . . . These mental laws, when 

 ascertained, will be the ultimate basis of the history of Europe; the physical 

 laws will be treated as of minor importance, and as merely giving rise to dis- 

 turbances, the force and frequency of which have, during several centuries, 

 perceptibly diminished. 1 



This conclusion leads Buckle to discuss the current meta- 

 physical method of studying mental phenomena, — the intuitional 

 method, as we now say, — and to suggest as Comte had done that 

 mental phenomena must be studied in their historical manifesta- 

 tions as furnishing an objective, " common to all." He was 

 evidently reaching after the modern method of physiological- 

 psychology. 



1 History of Civilization, pp. 138-143. 



