of genius alone remain : it is to them we owe all that we now have, they are for all ages and all times ; never young and never old, they bear the seeds of their own life ; they flow on in a perennial and undying stream ; they are essentially cumulative, and, giving birth to the additions which they subsequently receive, they thus influence the most distant posterity, and after the lapse of centuries produce more effect than they were able to do even at the moment of their promulgation.
Let us not allow the emotions stirred up by Mr. Buckle's eloquence to blind us to the real meaning of his grand words. We must note that the "eternal truths" do not concern morality, or that "flux and reflux" of human action which neutralises itself and forms no element of progress. They have still less to do with religion ; for they "outlive the struggles of rival creeds, and witness the decay of successive religions," but they are "the discoveries of genius" — not barren truths regarding intellect and will, and such-like metaphysical matters, which yield no fruit, but truths which teach man how to conquer and make use of nature, which tell him what he may do with water, and steam, and electricity, and wood, and coal, and iron, and gas, and skins, and horns. They are "essentially cumulative" : one man begins where the last ended, and adds improvement on improvement — not as in morals, where all men begin afresh, and no real advance is made. Again, it is evident that individual happiness or misery forms no element in Mr. Buckle's computation : he eliminates both vice and virtue, not only because they balance one another, but because, after a century or two, no vestiges are left of the greatest crimes or most splendid acts of goodness. Mr. Buckle, therefore, does not contemplate the action, but the result ; not the life or thinking of the man, but the work he has done, or the theory he has thought out. Where no trace remains of the work, nothing was done worth speaking of.
Having thus made the individual soul of no account in his investigations on the history of human progress, it is clear that only one manner of looking at mankind remains : if they are not to be viewed as persons in detail, they must be considered as bodies in mass. Hence not
