trace of disappointed _personal_ ambition,
but only a regret that the final avenue to truth should not have been
opened, was heroic even to sublimity. The pages of Buckle's 'History of
Civilization' which record the answer to his traducers and the
acknowledgment of his disappointment in relation to what he should be
able to achieve, will stand in the annals of literary history as a
memorable instance in which is significantly exhibited one factor of
that highest religious spirit so much needed in our day--_devotion to
the intellectual discovery of all truth for truth's sake_.

The following is the passage in question:

'In the moral world, as in the physical world, nothing is
anomalous; nothing is unnatural; nothing is strange. All is order,
symmetry, and law. There are opposites, but there are no
contradictions. In the character of a nation, inconsistency is
impossible. Such, however, is still the backward condition of the
human mind, and with so evil and jaundiced an eye do we approach
the greatest problems, that not only common writers, but even men
from whom better things might be hoped, are on this point involved
in constant confusion. Perplexing themselves and their readers by
speaking of inconsistency, as if it were a quality belonging to the
subject which they investigate, instead of being, as it really is,
a measure of their own ignorance. It is the business of the
historian to remove this ignorance by showing that the movements of
nations are perfectly regular, and that, like all other movements,
they are solely determined by their antecedents. If he cannot do
this, he is no historian. He may be an annalist, or a biographer,
or a chronicler, but higher than that he cannot rise, unless he is
imbued with that spirit of science which teaches, as an article of
faith, the doctrine of uniform sequence; in other words, the
doctrine that certain events having already happened, certain other
events corresponding to them will also happen. To seize this idea
with firmness, and to apply it on all occasions, without listening
to any exceptions, is extremely difficult, but it must be done by
whoever wishes to elevate the study of history from its present
crude and informal state, and do what he may toward placing it in
its proper rank, as the head and chief of all the sciences. Even
then,