We assume the validity of this prime source of belief.  Why not?  Here is a great natural product, human belief; we treat it precisely as we do other natural products; we judge, that, like these, it has its law and justification.  We assume that it is to be studied as Lyell studies the earth’s crust, or Agassiz its life, or Mueller its languages.  As our author shuns metaphysical, so do we shun metapsychical inquiries.  We do not presume to go behind universal fact, and inquire whether it has any business to be fact; we simply endeavor to see it in its largest and most interior aspect, and then accept it without question.

But M. Comte made the discovery that this great product of man’s spiritual nature is nothing but the spawn of his self-conceit:  that it is purely gratuitous, groundless, superfluous, and therefore in the deepest possible sense lawless, Mr. Buckle follows his master, for such Comte really is.  Proclaiming Law everywhere else, and, from his extreme partiality to the word, often lugging it in, as it were, by the ears, he no sooner arrives at these provinces than he instantly faces the other way, and denies all that he has before advocated.  Of a quadruped he will question not a hair, of a fish not a scale; everywhere else he will accept facts and seek to cooerdinate them; but when he arrives at the great natural outcome and manifestation of man’s spirit, then it is in an opposite way that he will not question; he simply lifts his eyebrows.  The fact has no business to be there!  It signifies nothing!

Why this reversal of position?  First, because, if consciousness be allowed, free-will must be admitted; since the universal consciousness is that of freedom to choose.  But there is a larger reason.  In accordance with his general notions, personality must be degraded, denuded, impoverished,—­that so the individual may lie passive in the arms of that society whose laws he is ambitious to expound.  Having robbed the soul of choice, he now deprives it of sight; having denied that it is an originating source of will, he now makes the complementary denial, that it is a like source of knowledge; having first made it helpless, he now proceeds to make it senseless.  And, indeed, the two denials belong together.  If it be true that the soul is helpless, pray let us have some kind drug to make it senseless also.  Nature has dealt thus equally with the stone; and surely she must design a like equality in her dealings with man.  Power and perceiving she will either give together, or together withhold.

But how does our author support this denial?  By pointing to the great varieties in the outcome of consciousness.  There is no unity, he says, in its determinations:  one believes this, another that, a third somewhat different from both; and the faith that one is ready to die for, another is ready to kill him for.  And true it is that the diversities of human belief are many and great; let not the fact be denied nor diminished.