And this is Mr. Buckle.  The first fact with regard to man is his possession of a rational soul, and consequently of that liberation of will without which, despite the existence of reason, he could not be in act a reasonable being.  But the secondary fact in this connection is that man’s freedom is modified by pedigree, by temperament, by influences almost numberless, and that he is included in laws, so that, if he falls away from reason, he falls into the hands of fate.  And this secondary or modifying congeries of facts our author announces as primary.

The first fact with regard to the soul is that it is intelligent and vocal,—­that it is not merely a subject, but also an organ, of THAT WHICH KNOWS in the universe.  The modifying fact is that its voice is commonly obscure, and the language it shall use and the logic of its utterance prescribed by the accident of time, place, and other circumstances; so that it has the semblance of voices many and contradictory.  And this modifying fact Mr. Buckle announces, with much assurance and complacency, as primary.

The first fact in the world of man is Personality.  The secondary fact is Society,—­secondary, but reciprocal, and full of import.  And Mr. Buckle begins with making Personality acephalous, and ends-with appending its corpse to Society, to be galvanized into seemings of life.  And if you follow him through his book, you find this inversion constantly maintained,—­and find, moreover, that it is chiefly this revolutionary audacity which makes his propositions so startling and his pages to many so fascinating.

Therefore an adventurer.  This is concerning him the primary fact.  But the modifying fact is that he has the manners of a gentleman, the heart of a humanitarian, the learning of a scholar, the pen of a ready writer, the outside or shell of a philosophical genius, excellent admixtures of sense, and an attractive hatred of ecclesiastical and political barbarisms.

He has great surface-reach, but no inward breadth.  He invariably takes the liberal side with regard to practical and popular questions; he invariably takes the illiberal side in respect to questions of philosophy.  In politics and in social feeling he is cosmopolitan; in questions of pure thought he is cockney.  Here he is a tyrant; he puts out the soul’s eyes, and casts fetters about its feet; here he is hard, narrow, materialistic, mechanical,—­or, in a word, English.  For—­we may turn aside to say—­in philosophy no nation is so straitened, illiberal, and hard of hearing as England, except, perhaps, China.  Its tympanum is sadly thickened at once with materialism and conceit; and the consequence is that a thinker there is either ignored into silence, like Wilkinson, or driven to bellow, like Carlyle, or to put rapiers and poignards into his speech, like Ruskin.  Carlyle began speaking sweetly and humanly, and was heard only on this side the ocean; then he came to his bull-of-Bashan tones, and was attended to on his own side the water.  It is observable, too, that, if a thinker in America goes beyond the respectable dinner-table depth, your true Englishman takes it for a personal affront, and hastens to make an ass of himself in the “Saturday Review.”