rectitude? If you retain, as in this case I do retain,
assurance of his moral rectitude,--of his intention to be fair,--to what
conclusion can you come more charitable than this, that his partiality
to his own notions is so vigorous as not only to overslaugh his sense
of logical truth, but to supersede the necessity of other grounds for
believing these notions and for urging them?

Only our author's first chapter has been dealt with; firstly, because in
this are enunciated those radical conceptions which he afterwards argues
not _to_, but _from_; and secondly, because it has been the writer's
desire, avoiding all vagrant and indecisive criticism, to have a fair
grapple, and come to some clear result,--like that of a wrestler, who
frankly proffers himself to throw or be thrown. It only remains to
indicate, so far as may be, a comprehensive estimate of Mr. Buckle as a
thinker.

And at last it must be said in plain words that he is to be regarded as
an adventurer in the kingdoms of thought,--though the word must be freed
from all customary flavors of charlatanry and wickedness. One of the
boldest and cleverest of his class; a man, too, of probity, of dignity
and character, amiable, estimable; but _intellectually_ an adventurer
nevertheless. The grand masters in thought are those to whom the
subtilest and most purely universal principles are nearest and most
habitual, coming to the elucidation of all minutest matters no less than
to that of the greatest,--as those forces which hold the solar system
together apply themselves, as on the same level, to a mote wandering
in the air; and because to these masters first principles, through all
their changes of seeming, through all their ranging by analogy up and
down, are never disguised, but are always near and clear and sure, they
can admit the action of all modifying principles without imperilling the
great stabilities of truth; so that in their thought, as in Nature, the
dust-particle shall float and fly with the wind, and yet gravitation
shall hold particle and world in firm, soft, imperial possession.
And next to these are the inventors, guided by a fine felicity of
intelligence to special discoveries and admirable combinations, often
surpassing in this way the masters themselves. And then come the wise
and great scholars, who learn quickly what has been discovered, and
follow the masters not by sight only, as a greyhound, but by long
inferences; and these also do noble work