Apply to Mr. Buckle any test that determines the question of pure intellectual power, and he fails to sustain it.  Let us proceed to apply one.

No man is an able thinker who is without power to comprehend that law of reciprocal opposites, on which the world is built.  For an example of this:  the universe is indeed a uni-verse, a pure unit, emanating, as we think, from a spirit that is, in the words of old Hooker, “not only one, but very oneness,” simple, indivisible, and therefore total in all action; and yet this universe is various, multifarious, full of special character, full even of fierce antagonisms and blazing contradictions.  Infinite and Finite, Same and Diverse, Eternal and Temporary, Universal and Special,—­here they are, purest opposites, yet mutual, reciprocal, necessary to each other; and he is a narrow man who cannot stand in open relations with both terms, reconciling in the depths of his life, though he can never explain, the mystery of their friendship.  He who will adhere only to the universal, and makes a blur of the special, is a rhapsodist; he who can apprehend only the special, being blind and callous to the universal, is a chatterer and magpie.  From these opposites we never escape; Destiny and Freedom, Rest and Motion, Individual and Society, Origination and Memory, Intuition and Observation, Soul and Body,—­you meet them everywhere; and everywhere they are, without losing their character of opposites, nay, in very virtue of their opposition, playing into and supporting each other.

But, from the fact that they are opposites, it is always easy to catch up one, and become its partisan as against the other.  It is easy in such advocacy to be plausible, forcible, affluent in words and apparent reasons; also to be bold, striking, astonishing.  And yet such an advocate will never speak a word of pure truth.  “He who knows half,” says Goethe, “speaks much, and says nothing to the purpose; he who knows all inclines to act, and speaks seldom or late.”  With such partisanship and advocacy the world has been liberally, and more than liberally, supplied.  Such a number of Eurekas have been shouted!  So often it has been discovered that the world is no such riddle, after all,—­that half of it is really the whole!  No doubt all this was good boy’s-play once; afterwards it did to laugh at for a while; then it ceased to be even a joke, and grew a weariness and an affliction; and at length we all rejoiced when the mighty world-pedagogue of Chelsea seized his ferule, and roared, over land and sea, “Silence, babblers!”

If only Mr. Buckle had profited by the command!  For, follow this writer where you will, you find him the partisan of a particular term as against its fraternal opposite.  It is Fate against Free-Will; Society against the prerogatives of Personality; Man against Outward Nature (for he considers them only as antagonistic, one “triumphing” over the other); Intellect against the Moral