all others more or less resemble ; he recounts the adventures of the ruler, to whose will multitudes bow. If he treats of mobs, or armies, or bodies of men, he invests this multitude with a kind of personality of its own, — its own wishes, passions, character, will, and conscience. Mr. Buckle's history, if he could write a history according to his programme, would be the reverse of all this : he would merge the individual in the company, the person in the body ; wishes, passions, character, conscience, 'all would be abstracted ; for those things either balance, and so neutralise each other, or else are transient in their effects, and so immaterial to the total. History would consist in tabular views of births, deaths, marriages, diseases, prices, commerce, and the like ; and the historian would be chiefly useful in providing grocers with cheap paper to wrap up butter in. But Mr. Buckle knows better than to reduce history to such dry chaff; when he writes history he makes persons his centres, and reduces it to what it must always be, an intricate and interlacing tissue of biographies, so far as men advanced some particular movement on which the historian is writing. Thus Louis XIV., Richelieu, and Burke crop out in Mr. Buckle's volume as the centres of his political speculations.
Mr. Buckle's practice herein is utterly contrary to his theory. History can only be reduced to a science by ^excluding individualism and personality. Persons act, if not by free-will, at least by unknown laws, which are in opposition, as Mr. Buckle owns, to the great statistical laws on which he would found historical science. The reason of this opposition is manifest ; and an explanation will clearly show why it is, and always will be, impossible to write a history upon Mr. Buckle's programme, and why he must be disappointed in his expectation of reducing history to a science.
All sciences are either inductive or deductive. We need not waste time in arguing with Mr. Buckle that history is not a deductive science, for he himself spends several pages in proving this proposition. It must, therefore, be a science depending upon induction. Now what
