This or that regulation,or this or that wheel of the political machinery may be superfluous or mischievous;but the question can only be decided by regarding the system as a whole,and not by treating the ruling power as something separable.Its interference has to be treated as abnormal or as simply mischievous,and yet as of vital importance in history.It becomes a mystery simply because we do not investigate its nature with due reference to its functions in the body politic.In other words,Buckle becomes incoherent because his method induces him from the start to neglect what is implied when society is described as organic.He was speaking an indisputable truth when he said that society depends throughout upon the 'environment'in the physical laws.It is not less true to say that as the intellectual progress develope,the recognition of those laws supplies an ultimate and unchangeable condition of the whole process of social growth.All civilisation depends absolutely,as he asserts,upon the corresponding state of knowledge.The error is in the assumption that we can therefore omit the consideration of the complex laws which govern the growth of the organism itself.The individualism which he shares with the Utilitarians makes him blind to the importance of the line of inquiry which was to show its power in the following period.If the primitive despotisms are set down simply as a necessary result of 'physical laws,'it is superfluous to inquire into the real nature of the institutions which they imply,or to gain any light upon the working of similar principles elsewhere.When the whole ecclesiastical and political constitution of later ages is set down simply as a relic of barbarism,and the religious and social instincts which are elaborated through them as simply products of ignorance,the process becomes unintelligible.If,therefore,Buckle was recognising a real condition of sound investigation,he condemned in advance the very kind of inquiry which has proved most fruitful.If he did more in his purely historical inquiries it was because he then forgot his philosophy and had to take into account the considerations which he had pronounced to be irrelevant.That,I believe,is the reason why Buckle,in spite of his surpassing abilities,did not make any corresponding mark upon later investigations.He was trying to frame a philosophy of history upon principles which really make the formation of a coherent philosophy impossible.Briefly,then,Buckle shared the ambition of the Utilitarians to make all the moral sciences scientific.So far as his writing strengthened the leaning to a scientific tendency he was working in the right direction.
Unfortunately he also shared their crude assumptions:the 'individualism'which ignores the social factor,and deduces all institutions from an abstract 'man';the tendency to explain the earlier from the later stages;and the impression that 'laws of nature'are to be unravelled by a summary method of discovering co-existences of concrete phenomena;and was therefore led to substitute hasty generalisations for that elaborate study of the growth of institutions and beliefs which has been the most marked tendency of sociological inquiry during the last generation.So far he shares and illustrates the real weakness of the Utilitarians,the premature attempt to constitute a science when we can only be labouring effectually by trying to determine the data.
