. And after these follow the
broader company of useful, able, eloquent men, applying, explaining,
illustrating, and preparing the way for schools and commerce and the
newspaper. Finally comes a man with a genius for boldness more than for
anything else, so that he has a pleasant feeling of himself only when
he gives himself the sense of being startling, novel, venturesome,
and therefore goes off in his thought as in a balloon: and of such
man,--being daring, ingenious, agile, and not being profound,--this
will be the unfailing characteristic, that he substitutes and asserts
secondary principles, which are obvious, outward, and within his reach,
for primary principles, which are deep, subtile, inward, and beyond his
reach; he will swing loose from the principles which are indeed prime
and imperial in Nature, and will boldly assert secondary principles as
fundamental: this man is the intellectual adventurer.

And this is Mr. Buckle. The first fact with regard to man is his
possession of a rational soul, and consequently of that liberation of
will without which, despite the existence of reason, he could not be in
act a reasonable being. But the secondary fact in this connection
is that man's freedom is modified by pedigree, by temperament, by
influences almost numberless, and that he is included in laws, so that,
if he falls away from reason, he falls into the hands of fate. And
this secondary or modifying congeries of facts our author announces as
primary.

The first fact with regard to the soul is that it is intelligent and
vocal,--that it is not merely a subject, but also an organ, of THAT
WHICH KNOWS in the universe. The modifying fact is that its voice is
commonly obscure, and the language it shall use and the logic of
its utterance prescribed by the accident of time, place, and other
circumstances; so that it has the semblance of voices many and
contradictory. And this modifying fact Mr. Buckle announces, with much
assurance and complacency, as primary.

The first fact in the world of man is Personality. The secondary fact is
Society,--secondary, but reciprocal, and full of import. And Mr. Buckle
begins with making Personality acephalous, and ends-with appending its
corpse to Society, to be galvanized into seemings of life. And if
you follow him through his book, you find this inversion constantly
maintained,--and find, moreover, that it is chiefly this revolutionary
audacity which makes his propositions so startl