Chapter XI.
Additional Elucidations Of The Science Of History.
§ 1. The doctrine which the preceding chapters were intended to enforce
and elucidate--that the collective series of social phenomena, in other
words the course of history, is subject to general laws, which philosophy
may possibly detect--has been familiar for generations to the scientific
thinkers of the Continent, and has for the last quarter of a century
passed out of their peculiar domain, into that of newspapers and ordinary
political discussion. In our own country, however, at the time of the
first publication of this Treatise, it was almost a novelty, and the
prevailing habits of thought on historical subjects were the very reverse
of a preparation for it. Since then a great change has taken place, and
has been eminently promoted by the important work of Mr. Buckle; who, with
characteristic energy, flung down this great principle, together with many
striking exemplifications of it, into the arena of popular discussion, to
be fought over by a sort of combatants, in the presence of a sort of
spectators, who would never even have been aware that there existed such a
principle if they had been left to learn its existence from the
speculations of pure science. And hence has arisen a considerable amount
of controversy, tending not only to make the principle rapidly familiar to
the majority of cultivated minds, but also to clear it from the confusions
and misunderstandings by which it was but natural that it should for a
time be clouded, and which impair the worth of the doctrine to those who
accept it, and are the stumbling-block of many who do not.
Among the impediments to the general acknowledgment, by thoughtful minds, of the subjection of historical facts to scientific laws, the most fundamental continues to be that which is grounded on the doctrine of Free Will, or, in other words, on the denial that the law of invariable Causation holds true of human volitions; for if it does not, the course of history, being the result of human volitions, can not be a subject of scientific laws, since the volitions on which it depends can neither be foreseen, nor reduced to any canon of regularity even after they have occurred. I have discussed this question, as far as seemed suitable to the occasion, in a former chapter; and I only think it necessary to repeat, that the doctrine of the Causation of human actions, improperly called the doctrine of Necessity, affirms no mysterious nexus, or overruling fatality: it asserts only that men's actions are the joint result of the general laws and circumstances of human nature, and of their own particular characters; those characters again being the consequence of the natural and artificial circumstances that constituted their education, among which circumstances must be reckoned their own conscious efforts. Any one who is willing to take (if the expression may be permitted) the trouble of thinking himself into the doctrine as thus stated, will find it, I believe, not only a faithful interpretation of the universal experience of human conduct, but a correct representation of the mode in which he himself, in every particular case, spontaneously interprets his own experience of that conduct.
But if this principle is true of individual man, it must be true of
