Mr. Buckle generalizes with marvellous facility, but often with an infatuation, or even fatuity, equally marvellous.  Specious and audacious generalization is, however, a vice of thinking more attractive to most than any virtue,—­above all, if it flatter their wishes and opinions.  There are few to appreciate an exquisite temperance, an exquisite virgin modesty, continence, and reserve, whether in thought or art.  The great masters disappoint, the great showmen dazzle, at first sight; the multitudes crave sensations and sudden effects.  Even among thoughtful men, there are, in this galloping age, too many who prefer to frequent a philosophical slop-shop, where they can be fitted to a full suit in five minutes; and they willingly forgive some bagging and wrinkling, some ripping of seams and dropping-off of buttons, in consideration of promptitude in the supply.  Nor is this unnatural.  Ordinary travel goes by steam; does it not seem a little hard that thought should have to journey still in the ancient fashion?  And so far as the mass of readers is concerned, this appetite for fast thinking and reckless generalization is a cheerful token:  it is a gainful substitute for that hiding away from the blaze of intellect, that terror of large results in thought, which has harbored in the Vatican since the days of Galileo, and even in Protestant lands may sometimes be found, like the graveyard, in the neighborhood of churches.  A relish for premature and extravagant generalization may be pardoned in the mass of readers; but in the writer?  “It must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!”

Mr. Buckle finds some general book-facts, and, never trying to think down to their roots, he seizes upon their specious aspect, and thence rushes out into a generalization, which, rightly understood, sweeps Personality off the earth.  Not such is the spirit of science; not such the manner of its masters.  Look at Newton investigating colors.  What effort for nearness, nearness, nearness to his facts!  What solicitation for entrance to their households and sanctuaries!  See Agassiz or Tyndale investigating the flow of glaciers.  Here is no catching at book-aspects of the matter, and launching instantly into generalization.  No, these men must get within eyeshot, within hand-reach, of the facts, and know first precisely and intimately what these are.  Yet the generalizations for which they were seeking a basis were trivial in comparison with those which our author hurtles out after a glance at M. Quetelet.  “A continuous average of so many murders a year; then so many must happen; then somebody must commit them; then free-will is a figment, and society is the source of all action which we call individual.”