One or two conspicuous examples of the result may be indicated.Buckle has to deal with the French revolution.(49)Nobody has been more emphatic in insisting that history should deal with the facts which illustrate the state of the people instead of confining itself to court intrigues.Nor could any one speak more strongly of the misery of the French population before the revolution.Yet the whole explanation has to be sought in the purely intellectual causes.The social causes are simply dropped out of account.The revolution was due to the French philosophers.Intellectual activity had been entirely suppressed by the despotism of Louis XIV.The philosophers,he holds,learned the new doctrine from England.The persecution of the freethinkers by the later rulers and a servile priesthood forced the philosophers to attack both the despots,and (unfortunately,as Buckle holds)to attack Christianity as well.Hence both the achievements and the incidental evils caused by the final outbreak.The theory,though strangely inadequate,is a natural corollary from the doctrine that the history of a nation is the history of its intellectual development.Voltaire's study of Locke becomes the efficient cause of a gigantic social change:Asingle characteristic,itself the product of many factors,is made to account for the whole complex process.Still more significant is his account of the decreasing influence of the warlike spirit.That,too,must be a product of purely intellectual causes.Divines have done nothing by preaching,but intellectual movement has operated in 'three leading ways.'(50)The discoveries of gunpowder,of free trade principles,and of the application of steam to travelling have produced the peaceable tendencies,which,in Buckle's day,were apparently so near a final triumph.Let us fully grant what I hope is true,that this corresponds to a truth;that the various forces which have brought men together may ultimately conduce to peace;and,moreover,that the discoveries of science are among the ultimate conditions of the most desirable of all changes.Does this enable us to abstract from the social movement?Gunpowder,according to Buckle,facilitated the differentiation of the military from the other classes.That already assumes a process only intelligible through the social history.Buckle tells us that 'divines'have done nothing.If he means that they have not persuaded nations,or not even tried to persuade them,to turn the second cheek,he is unanswerable.Religion,as he says elsewhere,(51)is an 'effect,'not a cause of human improvement.It can,in fact,be an original cause only on the hypothesis of a supernatural intervention.It must be an 'effect'in the sense that it is a product of human nature under all the conditions.If by religion is meant simply the belief in fictitious beings,it may be considered as simply an obstruction to scientific advance;and the priesthood,as Buckle generally seems to hold,is the gang of impostors who turn it to account.In any case,the 'moral'teaching of priests cannot be the ultimate cause of moral improvement.Yet no one,it might be supposed,could explain the history of the warlike sentiment in Europe without taking into account the influence embodied in the church.That the Catholic church represented a great principle of cohesion;that it was an organisation which enabled the men of intellect to exercise an influence over semi-barbarous warriors,are admitted facts which the historian is at least bound to consider.At whatever period the body may have become corrupt,it is an essential fact in the social processes which preceded the invention of gunpowder,and certainly the discoveries of Watt and Adam Smith.Buckle,as a rule,treats the church simply as an upholder of superstition.He ridicules the historians who believed in absurd miracles in 'what are rightly termed the dark ages,'(52)and declares summarily that 'until doubt began,progress was impossible.'Yet Buckle would certainly have admitted that there was some progress between the heptarchy and the reformation.
The truth which his method compels him to neglect seems to be obvious.The movement of religious thought represents forces not to be measured by the quantity of effete superstitions which it contains.The religion corresponds to the development of the instincts which determine the whole social structure.The general moral axioms --love your neighbour,and so forth --may,as Buckle urges,remain unaltered;but the change in the ideals of life and the whole attitude of men to each other takes place in the religious sphere.If Christianity does not correspond to a force imposed from without,it may still correspond to the processes of thought by which sympathy has extended and men been drawn into comparative unity and harmony.To treat the power of religion as simply a product of ignorant superstition is to be unable to understand the history of the world.So much Buckle might have learned from Comte in spite of the later vagaries of positivism.
