of illustrations and proofs.  The main ideas advanced in the Introduction—­for he did not live to write the body of the work, the future volumes to which he often pathetically refers—­these ideas may be thus stated:—­First:  Nothing had yet been done toward discovering the principles underlying the character and destiny of nations, to establish a basis for a science of history,—­a task which Buckle proposed to himself.  Second:  Experience shows that nations are governed by laws as fixed and regular as the laws of the physical world.  Third:  Climate, soil, food, and the aspects of nature are the primary causes in forming the character of a nation.  Fourth:  The civilization within and without Europe is determined by the fact that in Europe man is stronger than nature, and here alone has subdued her to his service; whereas on the other continents nature is the stronger and man has been subdued by her.  Fifth:  The continually increasing influence of mental laws and the continually diminishing influence of physical laws characterize the advance of European civilization.  Sixth:  The mental laws regulating the progress of society can only be discovered by such a comprehensive survey of facts as will enable us to eliminate disturbances; namely, by the method of averages.  Seventh:  Human progress is due to intellectual activity, which continually changes and expands, rather than to moral agencies, which from the beginnings of society have been more or less stationary.  Eighth:  In human affairs in general, individual efforts are insignificant, and great men work for evil rather than for good, and are moreover merely incidental to their age.  Ninth:  Religion, literature, art, and government instead of being causes of civilization, are merely its products.  Tenth:  The progress of civilization varies directly as skepticism—­the disposition to doubt, or the “protective spirit”—­the disposition to maintain without examination established beliefs and practices, predominates.

The new scientific methods of Darwin and Mill were just then being eagerly discussed in England; and Buckle, an alert student and great admirer of Mill, in touch with the new movements of the day, proposed, “by applying to the history of man those methods of investigation which have been found successful in other branches of knowledge, and rejecting all preconceived notions which could not bear the test of those methods,” to remove history from the condemnation of being a mere series of arbitrary facts, or a biography of famous men, or the small-beer chronicle of court gossip and intrigues, and to raise it to the level of an exact science, subject to mental laws as rigid and infallible as the laws of nature:—­