“Instead of telling us of those things which alone have any value—­instead of giving us information respecting the progress of knowledge and the way in which mankind has been affected by the diffusion of that knowledge ... the vast majority of historians fill their works with the most trifling and miserable details....  In other great branches of knowledge, observation has preceded discovery; first the facts have been registered and then their laws have been found.  But in the study of the history of man, the important facts have been neglected and the unimportant ones preserved.  The consequence is, that whoever now attempts to generalize historical phenomena must collect the facts as well as conduct the generalization.”

Buckle’s ideal of the office and acquirements of the historian was of the highest.  He must indeed possess a synthesis of the whole range of human knowledge to explain the progress of man.  By connecting history with political economy and statistics, he strove to make it exact.  And he exemplified his theories by taking up branches of scientific investigation hitherto considered entirely outside the province of the historian.  He first wrote history scientifically, pursuing the same methods and using the same kinds of proofs as the scientific worker.  The first volume excited as much angry discussion as Darwin’s ’Origin of Species’ had done in its day.  The boldness of its generalizations, its uncompromising and dogmatic tone, irritated more than one class of readers.  The chapters on Spain and on Scotland, with their strictures on the religions of those countries, containing some of the most brilliant passages in the book, brought up in arms against him both Catholics and Presbyterians.  Trained scientists blamed him for encroaching on their domains with an insufficient knowledge of the phenomena of the natural world, whence resulted a defective logic and vague generalizations.

It is true that Buckle was not trained in the methods of the schools; that he labored under the disadvantage of a self-taught, solitary worker, not receiving the friction of other vigorous minds; and that his reading, if extensive, was not always wisely chosen, and from its very amount often ill-digested.  He had knowledge rather than true learning, and taking this knowledge at second hand, often relied on sources that proved either untrustworthy or antiquated, for he lacked the true relator’s fine discrimination, that weighs and sifts authorities and rejects the inadequate.  Malicious critics declared that all was grist that came to his mill.  Yet his popularity with that class of readers whom he did not shock by his disquisitions on religions and morals, or make distrustful by his sweeping generalizations and scientific inaccuracies, is due to the fact that his book appeared at the right moment:  for the time was really come to make history something more than a chronicle of detached facts and anecdotes.  The scientific spirit was awake,