Mr. Buckle, with being unaware that consciousness does not apply to any matter which comes properly under the cognizance of the senses, and that the word can be honestly used in such applications only by the last extreme of ignorant or inadvertent latitude. Conscious of the existence of spectres!  One might as lawfully say he is “conscious” that there is a man in the moon, or that the color of his neighbor’s hair is due to a dye.  Mr. Buckle is undoubtedly honest.  How, then, could he, in strict philosophical discussion, employ the cardinal word in a sense flagrantly and even ludicrously false, in order to carry his point?  It is partly to be attributed to his controversial ardor, which is not only a heat, but a blaze, and frequently dazzles the eye of his understanding; but partly it is attributable also to an infirmity in the understanding itself.  He shows, indeed, a singular combination of intellectual qualities.  He has great external precision, and great inward looseness and slipperiness of mind:  so that, if you follow his words, no man’s thought can be clearer, no man’s logic more firm and rapid in its march; but if you follow strictly the conceptions, the clearness vanishes, and the logic limps, nay, sprawls.  It is not merely that he writes better than he thinks, though this is true of him; but the more characteristic fact is that he is a master in the forms of thought and an apprentice in the substance.  Read his pages, and you will find much to admire; read under his pages, and you will find much not to admire.

It appears from the foregoing what Mr. Buckle aims to accomplish at the outset.  His purpose is to effect a thorough degradation of Personality.  Till this is done, he finds no clear field for the action of social law.  To discrown and degrade Personality by taking away its two grand prerogatives,—­this is his preliminary labor, this is his way of procuring a site for that edifice of scientific history which he proposes to build.

But what an enormous price to pay for the purchase!  If there is no kingdom for social law, if there is no place for a science of history, till man is made unroyal, till the glory is taken from his brow, the sceptre from his right hand, and the regal hopes from his heart, till he is made a mere serf and an appanage of that ground and territory of circumstance whereon he lives and labors,—­why, then a science of history means much the same with an extinction of history, an extinction of all that in history which makes it inspiring.  The history of rats and mice is interesting, but not to themselves,—­interesting only to man, and this because he is man; but if men are nothing but rats and mice, pray let them look for cheese, and look out for the cat, and let goose-quills and history alone.

But the truth is that Person and Society are mutually supporting facts, each weakened by any impoverishment of its reciprocal term.  Whenever a real history of human civilization is written, they will thus appear.  And Mr. Buckle, in seeking to empty one term in order to obtain room for the other, was yielding concessions, not to the pure necessities of truth, but to his own infirmity as a thinker.