ity. "I pledge myself to show that the progress Europe has
made from barbarism to civilisation is entirely due to its intellectual
activity.... In what may be called the innate and original morals of
mankind there is, so far as we are aware, no progress." [Footnote:
Buckle has been very unjustly treated by some critics, but has found an
able defender in Mr. J.M. Robertson (Buckle and his Critics (1895)). The
remarks of Benn (History of Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, ii.
182 sqq.) are worth reading.]

Buckle was convinced that social phenomena exhibit the same undeviating
regularity as natural phenomena. In this belief he was chiefly
influenced by the investigations of the Belgian statistician Quetelet
(1835). "Statistics," he said, "has already thrown more light on the
study of human nature than all the sciences put together." From the
regularity with which the same crimes recur in the same state of
society, and many other constant averages, he inferred that all actions
of individuals result directly from the state of society in which they
live, and that laws are operating which, if we take large enough numbers
into account, scarcely undergo any sensible perturbation. [Footnote:
Kant had already appealed to statistics in a similar sense; see above,
p. 243.] Thus the evidence of statistics points to the conclusion that
progress is not determined by the acts of individual men, but depends
on general laws of the intellect which govern the successive stages of
public opinion. The totality of human actions at any given time depends
on the totality of knowledge and the extent of its diffusion.

There we have the theory that history is subject to general laws in its
most unqualified form, based on a fallacious view of the significance
of statistical facts. Buckle's attempt to show the operation of general
laws in the actual history of man was disappointing. When he went on to
review the concrete facts of the historical process, his own political
principles came into play, and he was more concerned with denouncing
the tendencies of which he did not approve than with extricating general
laws from the sequence of events. His comments on religious persecution
and the obscurantism of governments and churches were instructive
and timely, but they did not do much to exhibit a set of rigid laws
governing and explaining the course of human development.

The doctrine that history is under the irresistible control of law
was al