Sense; Induction against Deduction and Intuition; Knowledge against Reverence; and so on and on to the utter weariness of one reader, if of no more.  For what can be more wearying and saddening than to follow the pages of a writer who is fertile, ingenious, eloquent, rich in right feeling, in reading and courage, and yet who, in chapter after chapter of effective paragraphs, and tome after tome of powerful chapters, is merely persuading you that half is the whole?  And if your duty as a scholar require you to peruse the book fully, instead of casting it aside, your mind at length fairly aches for the sense of poise and soundness, were it only for a single page.  But no; it is always the same succession of perspicuous and vigorous sentences, all carrying flavors of important truth, and none utterly true.  For the half is really half; but it simply is not the whole, be as eloquent about it as one may.

Such, then, is the estimate here given of Mr. Buckle’s laborious and powerful work.  Meantime, with every secondary merit which such a work could possess this is replete; while its faults are only such as were inseparable from the conjunction of such ambitions with such powers.  He may whet and wield his blade; but he puts no poison on its edge.  He may disparage reverence; but he is not himself irreverent.  He may impugn the convictions that most men love; but, while withholding no syllable of dissent and reprehension, he utters not a syllable that can insult or sting.  And all the while his pages teem with observations full of point, and half full of admirable sense and suggestion.

After all, we owe him thanks,—­thanks, it may be, even for his errors.  The popular notions of moral liberty are probably not profound, and require deepening.  The grand fact that we name Personality is grand and of an unsounded depth only because in it Destiny and Freedom meet and become one.  But the play into this of Destiny and Eternal Necessity is, in general, dimly discerned.  The will is popularly pronounced free, but is thought to originate, as it were, “between one’s hat and his boots”; and so man loses all largeness of relation, and personality all grandeur.  Now blisters, though ill for health, may be wholesome for disease; and doctrines of Fate, that empty every man of his soul, may be good as against notions of moral liberty that make one’s soul of a pin’s-head dimension.  It may be well, also, that the doctrine of Social Fate should be preached until all are made to see that Society is a fact,—­that it is generative,—­that personal development cannot go on but by its mediation,—­that the chain of spiritual interdependence cannot be broken, and that in proportion as it is weakened every bosom becomes barren.  In this case also Mr. Buckle may be medicinal.  We owe him thanks also for refreshing our expectation of a science of civilization,—­for affirming the venerableness of intellect, which recent