Short Studies on Great Subjects | Page 2

share of all this; but there are also more
dangerous enemies that wait upon success like his. He had scarcely
won for himself the place which he deserved, than his health was found
shattered by his labours. He had but time to show us how large a man
he was--time just to sketch the outlines of his philosophy, and he
passed away as suddenly as he appeared. He went abroad to recover
strength for his work, but his work was done with and over. He died of
a fever at Damascus, vexed only that he was compelled to leave it
uncompleted. Almost his last conscious words were, 'My book, my
book! I shall never finish my book!' He went away as he had lived,
nobly careless of himself, and thinking only of the thing which he had
undertaken to do.
But his labour had not been thrown away. Disagree with him as we
might, the effect which he had already produced was unmistakable, and
it is not likely to pass away. What he said was not essentially new.
Some such interpretation of human things is as early as the beginning
of thought. But Mr. Buckle, on the one hand, had the art which belongs
to men of genius; he could present his opinions with peculiar
distinctness; and, on the other hand, there is much in the mode of
speculation at present current among us for which those opinions have
an unusual fascination. They do not please us, but they excite and

irritate us. We are angry with them; and we betray, in being so, an
uneasy misgiving that there may be more truth in those opinions than
we like to allow.
Mr. Buckle's general theory was something of this kind: When human
creatures began first to look about them in the world they lived in, there
seemed to be no order in anything. Days and nights were not the same
length. The air was sometimes hot and sometimes cold. Some of the
stars rose and set like the sun; some were almost motionless in the sky;
some described circles round a central star above the north horizon.
The planets went on principles of their own; and in the elements there
seemed nothing but caprice. Sun and moon would at times go out in
eclipse. Sometimes the earth itself would shake under men's feet; and
they could only suppose that earth and air and sky and water were
inhabited and managed by creatures as wayward as themselves.
Time went on, and the disorder began to arrange itself. Certain
influences seemed beneficent to men, others malignant and destructive,
and the world was supposed to be animated by good spirits and evil
spirits, who were continually fighting against each other, in outward
nature and in human creatures themselves. Finally, as men observed
more and imagined less, these interpretations gave way also.
Phenomena the most opposite in effect were seen to be the result of the
same natural law. The fire did not burn the house down if the owners of
it were careful, but remained on the hearth and boiled the pot; nor did it
seem more inclined to burn a bad man's house down than a good man's,
provided the badness did not take the form of negligence. The
phenomena of nature were found for the most part to proceed in an
orderly, regular way, and their variations to be such as could be
counted upon. From observing the order of things, the step was easy to
cause and effect. An eclipse, instead of being a sign of the anger of
Heaven, was found to be the necessary and innocent result of the
relative position of sun, moon, and earth. The comets became bodies in
space, unrelated to the beings who had imagined that all creation was
watching them and their doings. By degrees, caprice, volition, all
symptoms of arbitrary action, disappeared out of the universe; and
almost every phenomenon in earth or heaven was found attributable to

some law, either understood or perceived to exist. Thus nature was
reclaimed from the imagination. The first fantastic conception of things
gave way before the moral; the moral in turn gave way before the
natural; and at last there was left but one small tract of jungle where the
theory of law had failed to penetrate--the doings and characters of
human creatures themselves.
There, and only there, amidst the conflicts of reason and emotion,
conscience and desire, spiritual forces were still conceived to exist.
Cause and effect were not traceable when there was a free volition to
disturb the connection. In all other things, from a given set of
conditions, the consequences necessarily followed. With man, the word
law changed its meaning; and instead of a fixed order, which he could
not choose but follow, it