r suggestions, the product. Nothing, indeed, is there which
confers dignity upon human life and labor, that is not primarily due to
the same source. In union with popular and unconscious imagination, it
generates mythology; in union with imagination and reason, it gives
birth to theology and cosmogony; in union with imagination, reason, and
experience, it is the source of philosophy; in union with the same,
together with the artistic sense and high degrees of imaginative
sympathy, it creates epic poetry and art. Its total outcome, however,
may be included under the term Belief. And it results from an assumed
validity of consciousness, that universal belief is always an indication
of universal truth. At the same time, since this master-power finds
expression through faculties various in kind and still more various in
grade of development, its outcome assumes many shapes and hues,--just
as crystallized alumina becomes here ruby and there sapphire, by minute
admixtures of different coloring substances.

We assume the validity of this prime source of belief. Why not? Here is
a great natural product, human belief; we treat it precisely as we do
other natural products; we judge, that, like these, it has its law and
justification. We assume that it is to be studied as Lyell studies the
earth's crust, or Agassiz its life, or Mueller its languages. As our
author shuns metaphysical, so do we shun metapsychical inquiries. We do
not presume to go behind universal fact, and inquire whether it has any
business to be fact; we simply endeavor to see it in its largest and
most interior aspect, and then accept it without question.

But M. Comte made the discovery that this great product of man's
spiritual nature is nothing but the spawn of his self-conceit: that it
is purely gratuitous, groundless, superfluous, and therefore in the
deepest possible sense lawless, Mr. Buckle follows his master, for such
Comte really is. Proclaiming Law everywhere else, and, from his extreme
partiality to the word, often lugging it in, as it were, by the ears, he
no sooner arrives at these provinces than he instantly faces the other
way, and denies all that he has before advocated. Of a quadruped he will
question not a hair, of a fish not a scale; everywhere else he will
accept facts and seek to cooerdinate them; but when he arrives at the
great natural outcome and manifestation of man's spirit, then it is in
an opposite way that he will not question; he s