omte, the task of sociologists and historians.

9. The hypothesis of general laws operative in history was carried
further in a book which appeared in England twenty years later and
exercised an influence in Europe far beyond its intrinsic merit,
Buckle's _History of Civilisation in England_ (1857-61). Buckle owed
much to Comte, and followed him, or rather outdid him, in regarding
intellect as the most important factor conditioning the upward
development of man, so that progress, according to him, consisted in
the victory of the intellectual over the moral laws.

10. The tendency of Comte and Buckle to assimilate history to the
sciences of nature by reducing it to general "laws," derived stimulus
and plausibility from the vista offered by the study of statistics,
in which the Belgian Quetelet, whose book _Sur l'homme_ appeared in
1835, discerned endless possibilities. The astonishing uniformities
which statistical inquiry disclosed led to the belief that it was only
a question of collecting a sufficient amount of statistical material,
to enable us to predict how a given social group will act in a
particular case. Bourdeau, a disciple of this school, looks forward to
the time when historical science will become entirely quantitative.
The actions of prominent individuals, which are generally considered
to have altered or determined the course of things, are obviously not
amenable to statistical computation or explicable by general laws.
Thinkers like Buckle sought to minimise their importance or explain
them away.

11. These indications may suffice to show that the new efforts to
interpret history which marked the first half of the nineteenth
century were governed by conceptions closely related to those which
were current in the field of natural science and which resulted in the
doctrine of evolution. The genetic principle, progressive development,
general laws, the significance of time, the conception of society as
an organic aggregate, the metaphysical theory of history as the
self-evolution of spirit,--all these ideas show that historical
inquiry had been advancing independently on somewhat parallel lines to
the sciences of nature. It was necessary to bring this out in order to
appreciate the influence of Darwinism.

12. In the course of the dozen years which elapsed between the
appearances of _The Origin of Species_ (observe that the first volume
of Buckle's work was published just two years before) and of _The
D