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 th