BUCKLE, Henry Thomas (1821–1862), the son of Thomas Henry Buckle, a wealthy London merchant, and his wife, Jane Middleton, was born at Lee, in Kent, Nov ember 24, 1821. He was a feeble and delicate child, who took no pleasure in the society and amusements of other children, but who loved to sit for hours hearing his mother read the Bible, and whose own love of reading was called forth by a present from her of the Arabian Nights. In his mother he found unfailing mental sympathy and stimulus, aiid her share in the education of his mind and the forma tion of his character was very great. Although she was of a naturally strong religious temperament, a painful personal experience had given her a horror of imposed doctrines, and, according to the testimony of Miss Shirreff, she refrained from teaching dogmatically even such views as were full of hope and consolation to herself. To her Buckle seems specially to have owed his faith in progress through the triumph of truth, his taste for speculation, and his love of poetry. In common with his father he had a keen interest in politics, a very retentive memory, and a fondness for reciting Shakespeare. Even as a child he showed conversational power, and the only game he cared for was playing at "parson and clerk," with a cousin of about his own age, he himself taking the part of preacher. Owing to his delicate health he was only a very short time at school, and never at college, but the love of reading having been early awakened in him, he was allowed ample means of gratifying it. In every fair estimate of his character due weight must be given to the fact that he was a self-educated man, although one placed in exceptionally favourable circumstances, and that while he had in a large measure the merits which flow from self -education he could not altogether escape the defects which naturally accompany them. He gained his first distinctions not in literature but in chess, being reputed, before he was twenty, one of the first players in the world. His father died in January 1840, and in July of that year his mother, his unmarried sister, and himself left England and travelled in France, Italy, and Germany for a year, during which time, as also after his return home, he studied diligently modern languages. From the spring of 1843 to that of 1844 was likewise spent on the Continent, He had by that time formed the resolution to direct all his reading and to devote all his energies to the preparation of some great historical work, and during the next seventeen years, with rare self- denial, he bestowed ten hours each day in working out his purpose. At first he contemplated a history of the Middle Ages, but by 1851 he had decided in favour of a history of civilization. The six years which followed were occupied in writing and rewriting, altering and revising the first volume, which appeared in June 1857. It at once made its author a literary and even social celebrity, the lion of a London season. On 19th March 1858 lie delivered at the Royal Institution a lecture on the Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge, which was published in Fraser s Magazine for April 1858, whence it has been reprinted in the first volume of the Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works. The professed aim of this his first and only lecture in public was to prove that women naturally prefer the deductive method to the inductive, and that by encouraging in men deductive habits of thought, they have rendered an immense, though unconscious, service to the pro gress of knowledge, by preventing men of science from being as exclusively inductive as they would otherwise be ; but the facts and reasons adduced in support of these proposi tions were few and indecisive, the discourse being in the main simply an eloquent general pleading for the combina tion of deduction and induction in scientific investigation. On 1st April 1859, a crushing and desolating affliction fell upon him in the death of his mother. It was under the immediate impression of his loss that he concluded a review he was writing of Mr J. S. Mill s Essay on Liberty with an argument for immortality, based on the yearning of the affections to regain communion with the beloved dead, on the impossibility of standing up and living, if we believed the separation were final. The argument is a strange one to have been used by a man who had maintained so strongly that " we have the testimony of all history to prove the extreme fallibility of consciousness," The review appeared in Fraser s Magazine, May 1859, and is now to be found also in the Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works. The second volume of his history was published in May 1861, Soon after he left England for the East, in order to recruit his spirits and restore his health. From the end of October 1861 to the beginning of March 1862 was spent by him in Egypt, from which he went over the desert of Sinai and of Edom to Syria, reaching Jerusalem on April 19, 1862. After staying there eleven days, he set out for Europe by Beyrout, but at Nazareth he was attacked by fever ; and, endeavouring to shake it off and struggle onwards, when rest was what he required, he fell a victim to it at Damascus on May 29, 1862, aged forty. The marble altar-tomb over his grave has inscribed on it an ancient Arabic couplet which signifies,—
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" The written word remains long after the writer ; The writer is resting under the earth, but his works endure/
The three volumes of Buckle s Miscellaneous and Post humous Works, edited by Miss Helen Taylor, and published in 1872, contain the lecture delivered at the Royal In stitution, and the review of Mill s Liberty^ which have been already mentioned, " A Letter to a Gentleman on Pooley s Case," "Fragments," of which the portions relat ing to Queen Elizabeth appeared in Fraser s Magazine about five years after the author s death, and " Common place Books," composed of abstracts of works read, and collections of facts and ideas meant to be wrought into his magnum opus, or, at least, to assist him in comprehend ing the history of civilization. The " Common-place Books " fill the second and third volumes, and it may be reasonably questioned whether matter so unsifted and unformed as is the bulk of that of which they consist should ever have been published.
History of Civilization in England. It is a gigantic unfinished introduction, of which the plan was, first, to state the general principles of the author s method and the general laws which govern the course of human progress ; and secondly, to exemplify these principles and laws through the histories of certain nations characterized by prominent and peculiar features, Spain and Scotland, the United States and Germany. Its chief ideas are, 1, That, owing partly to the want of ability in historians, and partly to the complexity of social phenomena, extremely little has as yet been done towards discovering the principles which govern the character and dssciny of nations, or, in other words, towards establishing a science of history ; 2. That, while the theological dogma of predestination is a barren hypothesis beyond the province of knowledge, and the metaphysical dogma of free will rests on an erroneous belief in the infallibility of consciousness, it is proved by science, and especially by statistics, that human actions are governed by laws as fixed and regular as those which rule in the physical world; 3. That climate, soil, food, and the aspects of nature, are the primary causes of intel lectual progress, the first three indirectly, through deter mining the accumulation and distribution of wealth, and the last by directly influencing the accumulation and distribution of thought, the imagination being stimulated
and the understanding subdued when the phenomena of
