he 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:--

"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