t feeling, in reading and
courage, and yet who, in chapter after chapter of effective paragraphs,
and tome after tome of powerful chapters, is merely persuading you that
half is the whole? And if your duty as a scholar require you to peruse
the book fully, instead of casting it aside, your mind at length fairly
_aches_ for the sense of poise and soundness, were it only for a single
page. But no; it is always the same succession of perspicuous and
vigorous sentences, all carrying flavors of important truth, and none
utterly true. For the half _is_ really half; but it simply is _not_ the
whole, be as eloquent about it as one may.

Such, then, is the estimate here given of Mr. Buckle's laborious and
powerful work. Meantime, with every secondary merit which such a work
_could_ possess this is replete; while its faults are only such as were
inseparable from the conjunction of such ambitions with such powers. He
may whet and wield his blade; but he puts no poison on its edge. He may
disparage reverence; but he is not himself irreverent. He may impugn the
convictions that most men love; but, while withholding no syllable of
dissent and reprehension, he utters not a syllable that can insult or
sting. And all the while his pages teem with observations full of point,
and half full of admirable sense and suggestion.

After all, we owe him thanks,--thanks, it may be, even for his errors.
The popular notions of moral liberty are probably not profound, and
require deepening. The grand fact that we name Personality _is_ grand
and of an unsounded depth only because in it Destiny and Freedom meet
and become one. But the play into this of Destiny and Eternal Necessity
is, in general, dimly discerned. The will is popularly pronounced free,
but is thought to originate, as it were, "between one's hat and his
boots"; and so man loses all largeness of relation, and personality all
grandeur. Now blisters, though ill for health, may be wholesome for
disease; and doctrines of Fate, that empty every man of his soul, may
be good as against notions of moral liberty that make one's soul of a
pin's-head dimension. It may be well, also, that the doctrine of Social
Fate should be preached until all are made to see that Society is a
fact,--that it is generative,--that personal development cannot go on
but by its mediation,--that the chain of spiritual interdependence
cannot be broken, and that in proportion as it is weakened every bosom
becomes barren.