nstrumentality, to reduce the whole body of our
Knowledge to a systematic whole, and to establish a Science of Sciences
which should be a Criterion of Truth, and the crowning intellectual
achievement of the ages. Whether Mr. Buckle fully comprehended the real
nature of the Science toward which he was aiming; whether he entirely
appreciated the radical and important change which its discovery would
necessarily introduce into our Methods of Investigation;--whether he
saw that it would be the inauguration of a true Deductive Mode of
reasoning, which would enable us to advance with incredible rapidity and
certainty into the arcana of those departments which he was then obliged
to explore with the most tedious research, the most plodding patience,
and the most destructive intellectual tension, in order to accumulate a
limited array of Facts, is somewhat doubtful.

The significant sentence which occurs in the second volume of his work,
closely following the announcement of his disappointment at being unable
to achieve all that he had expected and promised, and which states that
'in a complete scheme of our knowledge, and when all our resources are
fully developed and marshalled into order, as they must eventually be,
the two methods [the Inductive and the Deductive] will be, not hostile,
but supplementary, and will be combined into a single system,' seems to
indicate that at some period prior to the publication of the second
volume, and subsequent to the issue of the first, the insufficient
nature of the Inductive Method as a Scientific guide broke upon him, and
some conception of the nature of a Mode of Reasoning which should
combine the two Processes in just relations, began to dawn into his
mind. That he obtained anything more than a faint glimpse of the true
Method, is not likely. Had he done so, he would certainly have made some
statement of the great results which would follow its inauguration, even
if he could have refrained from bestowing one of his glowing and
enraptured paragraphs upon the fairest and most entrancing vision of
future achievement which the devotee of intellectual investigation will
ever witness.

It is probable, that in carrying on his investigations after the
publication of the first volume of his work, finding it impossible to
handle the accumulations of Facts necessary to his purpose, and
discovering the inexactitude and insufficiency of his Generalizations in
the ratio that the bounds of his fie