Short Studies on Great Subjects | Page 3

James Anthony Froude
became a moral precept, which he might
disobey if he dared.
This it was which Mr. Buckle disbelieved. The economy which
prevailed throughout nature, he thought it very unlikely should admit of
this exception. He considered that human beings acted necessarily from
the impulse of outward circumstances upon their mental and bodily
condition at any given moment. Every man, he said, acted from a
motive; and his conduct was determined by the motive which affected
him most powerfully. Every man naturally desires what he supposes to
be good for him; but to do well, he must know well. He will eat poison,
so long as he does not know that it is poison. Let him see that it will kill
him, and he will not touch it. The question was not of moral right and
wrong. Once let him be thoroughly made to feel that the thing is
destructive, and he will leave it alone by the law of his nature. His
virtues are the result of knowledge; his faults, the necessary
consequence of the want of it. A boy desires to draw. He knows
nothing about it: he draws men like trees or houses, with their centre of
gravity anywhere. He makes mistakes, because he knows no better. We
do not blame him. Till he is better taught he cannot help it. But his
instruction begins. He arrives at straight lines; then at solids; then at
curves. He learns perspective, and light and shade. He observes more
accurately the forms which he wishes to represent. He perceives effects,
and he perceives the means by which they are produced. He has learned

what to do; and, in part, he has learned how to do it. His after-progress
will depend on the amount of force which his nature possesses; but all
this is as natural as the growth of an acorn. You do not preach to the
acorn that it is its duty to become a large tree; you do not preach to the
art-pupil that it is his duty to become a Holbein. You plant your acorn
in favourable soil, where it can have light and air, and be sheltered from
the wind; you remove the superfluous branches, you train the strength
into the leading shoots. The acorn will then become as fine a tree as it
has vital force to become. The difference between men and other things
is only in the largeness and variety of man's capacities; and in this
special capacity, that he alone has the power of observing the
circumstances favourable to his own growth, and can apply them for
himself. Yet, again, with this condition,--that he is not, as is commonly
supposed, free to choose whether he will make use of these appliances
or not. When he knows what is good for him, he will choose it; and he
will judge what is good for him by the circumstances which have made
him what he is.
And what he would do, Mr. Buckle supposed that he always had done.
His history had been a natural growth as much as the growth of the
acorn. His improvement had followed the progress of his knowledge;
and, by a comparison of his outward circumstances with the condition
of his mind, his whole proceedings on this planet, his creeds and
constitutions, his good deeds and his bad, his arts and his sciences, his
empires and his revolutions, would be found all to arrange themselves
into clear relations of cause and effect.
If, when Mr. Buckle pressed his conclusions, we objected the difficulty
of finding what the truth about past times really was, he would admit it
candidly as far as concerned individuals; but there was not the same
difficulty, he said, with masses of men. We might disagree about the
characters of Julius or Tiberius Cæsar, but we could know well enough
the Romans of the Empire. We had their literature to tell us how they
thought; we had their laws to tell us how they governed; we had the
broad face of the world, the huge mountainous outline of their general
doings upon it, to tell us how they acted. He believed it was all
reducible to laws, and could be made as intelligible as the growth of the

chalk cliffs or the coal measures.
And thus consistently Mr. Buckle cared little for individuals. He did
not believe (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the
history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms,
obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more
erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would have
been much the same.
As an illustration of the truth of his view, he would point to the new
science of Political Economy.
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