Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 by Various

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The foundation-timber of Mr. Buckle's work consists of three pieces, or
propositions, two of which take the form of denial. First, he denies
that there is in man anything of the nature of Free-Will, and attributes
the belief in it to vulgar and childish ignorance. Secondly, and in
support of the primary negation, he denies that there is any oracle in
man's bosom,--that his spirit had any knowledge of itself or of the
relationships it sustains: in other words, denies the validity of
Consciousness. Thirdly and lastly, he attempts to show that all actions
of individuals originate not in themselves, but result from a law
working in the general and indistinguishable _lump_ of society,--from
laws of like nature with that which preserves the balance of the sexes;
so that no man has more to do with his own deed than the mother in
determining whether her child shall be male or female. By the two
former statements man is stripped of all the grander prerogatives and
characteristics of personality; by the last he is placed as freight,
whether dead or alive it were hard to say, in the hold of the
self-steering ship, "Society." These propositions and the reasons, or
unreasons, by which they are supported, we will examine in order.

1. _Free-Will_. The question of free-will has at sundry times and
seasons, and by champions many and furious, been disputed, till the
ground about it is all beaten into blinding dust, wherein no reasonable
man can now desire to cloud his eyes and clog his lungs. It is, indeed,
one of the cheerful signs of our times, that there is a growing relish
for clear air and open skies, a growing indisposition to mingle in old
and profitless controversies. It commonly happens in such controversies,
as it undoubtedly has happened in the dispute about free-will, that both
parties have been trying to pull up Life or Spirit by the roots, and
make a show, _a la_ Barnum, of all its secrets. The enterprise was
zealously prosecuted, but would not prosper. In truth, there are strict
and jealous limits to the degree in which man's mind can become an
object to itself. By silent consciousness, by an action of reason and
imagination sympathetic with pure inward life, man may _feel_ far down
into the sweet, awful depths and mysteries of his being; and the results
of this inward intimation are given in the great poems, the great art
and divine philosophy of all time, and in the commanding beliefs of
mankind; but so soon as one begins to come to his own existence as an
outsider and stranger, and attempts to bear away its secret, so soon he
begins to be balked.

Mr. Buckle, however, has assumed in a summary and authoritative way to
settle this question of free-will; and, without entering into the dust
and suffocation of the old interminable dispute, we may follow him far
enough to see whether he has thrown any light upon the matter, or has
only thrown light upon his own powers as a thinker.

His direct polemic against the doctrine of Free-Will consists simply
of an attempt to identify it with the notion of Chance in physics. The
notion of Chance, he says, is the same with that of Free-Will; the
doctrine of Necessary Connection with the dogma of Predestination. This
statement has certainly an imposing air. But consider it. To assert the
identity of chance and free-will is but another way of saying that pure
freedom is one and the same with absolute lawlessness,--that where
freedom exists, law, order, reason do not. If this be a misconception,
as it surely is a total and fatal misconception, of the nature of
freedom, then does the statement of our author, with all that rests upon
it, fall instantly and utterly to the ground.

It is a misconception. Freedom and lawlessness are not the same. To make
this finally clear, let us at once give the argument the widest possible
scope; since the largest way of looking at the matter, as indeed it
often happens, will prove also the nearest and simplest. In the universe
as a whole Will does certainly originate, since there is, undoubtedly,
origination somewhere. Freely, too, it must arise, for there is nothing
behind it to bring it under constraint: indeed, all origination is by
its nature free. But our philosopher tells us that wherever there is
a pure and free origination of will, there is lawlessness, caprice,
chance. The universe, therefore, should be a scene, not of absolute
order, but of absolute disorder; and since it is not such, we have
nothing for it but to say that either the logic of the universe, or that
of Mr. Buckle, is very much awry.

In the universe, Will freely originates, but forever in unison with
divine Reason; and the result is at once pure necessity and pure
freedom: for these, if both be, as we say, absolutely _pure_, are one
and the same. A coercing necessity is impure, for it is at war with that
to which it applies; only a necessity in sweetest affinity with that
which it governs is of the purest degree; and this is, of course,
identical with the highest and divinest freedom.

And here we approach the solution of our problem, so far as it can be
solved. Freedom and free-will exist only in virtue of reason, only
in connection with the rational soul. In a rough account of man, and
leaving out of sight all that is not strictly relevant to the present
point, we discriminate in him two natures. One of these comprises the
whole body of organic desires and energies, with all that _kind_ of
intellect by which one perceives the relation of things to his selfish
wishes. By this nature, man is a selfish and intellectual animal; a
polyp with arms that go round the world; a sponge with eyes and energies
and delights; a cunning _ego_, to whom all outside of himself is but for
a prey. But aloft over this, and constituting the second nature, into
whose kingdom one should be born as by a second birth, is the sovereign
eye and soul of Reason, discerning Justice and Beauty and the Best,
creating in man's bosom an ideal, redeeming him out of his littleness,
bringing him into fellowship with Eternal Truth, and making him
universal. Now between these two natures there is, for there must be, a
mediating term, a power by which man _enacts_ reason, and causes doing
to accord with seeing. This is will, and it must, from its very nature,
be free; for to say that it is a mere representative of the major force
in desire is simply to say that it does not exist. A mediation without
freedom in the mediator is something worse than the mediation of Holland
between England and the United States in the dispute concerning the
North-East Boundary.

So far, now, as the sovereign law and benefaction of the higher nature,
through a perfect mediation of the will, descends upon the lower, so
far man enters into free alliance with that which is sovereign in the
universe, and is himself established in perfected freedom. The right
action of free-will is, then, freedom in the making. But by this
entrance into the great harmonies of the world, by this loyalty to the
universal reason which alone makes one free, it must be evident that the
order of the world is graced and supported rather than assailed.

But how if free-will fail of its highest function? Must not the order of
the world then suffer? Not a whit. Universal Reason prevails, but in two
diverse ways: she may either be felt as a mere Force or Fate, or she
may be recognized and loved and obeyed as an Authority. Wherever the
rational soul, her oracle, is given, there she proffers the privilege of
knowing her only as a divine authority,--of free loyalty, of honorable
citizenship in her domains. But to those who refuse this privilege she
appears as fate; and though their honor is lost, hers is not; for the
order of the world continues to be vindicated. The just and faithful
citizen, who of his own election obeys the laws, illustrates in one way
the order of society and the supremacy of moral law. The villain in the
penitentiary illustrates the order of society and the supremacy of moral
law in quite another way. But order and law are illustrated by both,
though in ways so very different. So one may refuse to make reason a
free necessity in his own bosom; but then the constable of the universe
speedily taps him upon the shoulder, and law is honored, though he is
disgraced.

Now Mr. Buckle supposed that order in the world and in history could be
obtained only by sacrificing the freedom of the individual; and that he
so supposed determines his own rank as a thinker. There is no second
question to be asked concerning a candidate for the degree of master in
philosophy who begins by making this mistake.

But does some one, unwilling so soon to quit the point, require of me
to explain _how_ will can originate in man? My only answer is, I do not
know. Does the questioner know _how_ motion originates in the universe?
It does or did originate; science is clear in assigning a progress, and
therefore a beginning, to the solar system: can you find its origin in
aught but the self-activity of Spirit, whose _modus operandi_ no man can
explain? _All_ origination is inscrutable; the plummet of understanding
cannot sound it; but wherefore may not one sleep as sweetly, knowing
that the wondrous fact is near at hand, in the bosoms of his
contemporaries and in his own being, as if it were pushed well out of
sight into the depths of primeval time? To my mind, there is something
thoroughly weak and ridiculous in the way that Comte and his company run
away from the Absolute and Inexplicable, fearing only its nearness; like
a child who is quite willing there should he bears at the North Pole,
but would lie awake of nights, if he thought there were one in the
nearest wood. And it is the more ridiculous because Mystery is no bear;
nor can I, for one, conceive why it should not be to every man a joy to
know that all the marvel which ever was in Nature is in her now, and
that the divine inscrutable processes are going on under our eyes and in
them and in our hearts.

Doubtless, however, many will adhere to the logic that has satisfied
them so long and so well,--that it is impossible the will should move
otherwise than in obedience to motives, and that, obeying a motive, it
is not free. Why should we not, then, amuse ourselves a little with
these complacent motive-mongers? They profess a perfect explanation of
mental action, and make it the stigma of a deeper philosophy, that
it must leave somewhat in all action of the mind, and therefore in
a doctrine of the will, unexplained. Let, now, these good gentlemen
explain to us how a motive ever gets to be a motive. For there is
precisely the same difficulty in initiating motion here as elsewhere.
You look on a peach; you desire it; and you are moved by the desire to
pluck or purchase it. Now it is plain that you could not desire this
peach until you had perceived that it was a desirable fruit. But
you could not perceive that the fruit was desirable until you had
experienced desire of it. And here we are at the old, inexplicable
seesaw. It must appear desirable in order to be desired; it must be
desired in order to appear desirable: the perception must precede the
desire, and the desire must precede the perception. These are foolish
subtilties, but all the fitter for their purpose. Our motive-mongering
friends should understand that they can explain no farther than their
neighbors,--that by enslaving the will they only shift the difficulty,
not solve it.

Anything but this shallow sciolism! More philosophical a thousand times
than the knowing and facile metaphysic which makes man a thing of
springs and pivots and cogs, are the notions of old religionists, which
attributed human action in large part to preventing, suggesting, and
efficient "grace," or those of older poets, who gave Pallas Athene for
a counsellor to Odysseus, and Krishna for a teacher to the young Aryan
warrior,--which represent human action, that is, as issuing in part out
of the Infinite. A thousand times more _philosophical_, as well as
ten thousand times more inspiring, I say, are the metaphysics of
Imagination,--of scriptures and great poems and the _live_ human
heart,--than the cut-and-dried sciolisms which explain you a man in five
minutes, and make everything in him as obvious as the movements of a
jumping-jack.

To deny, then, the existence of free-will is, in my judgment, a grave
error; but to deny it on the ground of its identity with chance is more
than an ordinary error, however grave; it is a poison in the blood of
one's thought, conveying its vice to every part and function of the
system. And herewith we pass to the next head.

2. _Consciousness_. It has been the persuasion of wise men in various
ages, and is the persuasion of many, as wise, doubtless, as their
neighbors, now, that the soul has a native sense of its quality and
perpetual relations. By Plato this sense, in some of its aspects, was
named Reminiscence; by modern speakers of English it is denoted as
Consciousness. This, according to its grades and applications, is
qualified as personal, moral, intellectual, or, including all its higher
functions, as intuitive or spiritual. Of this high spiritual sense, this
self-recognition of soul, all the master-words of the language--God,
Immortality, Life, Love, Duty--are either wholly, or in all their
grander suggestions, the product. Nothing, indeed, is there which
confers dignity upon human life and labor, that is not primarily due to
the same source. In union with popular and unconscious imagination, it
generates mythology; in union with imagination and reason, it gives
birth to theology and cosmogony; in union with imagination, reason, and
experience, it is the source of philosophy; in union with the same,
together with the artistic sense and high degrees of imaginative
sympathy, it creates epic poetry and art. Its total outcome, however,
may be included under the term Belief. And it results from an assumed
validity of consciousness, that universal belief is always an indication
of universal truth. At the same time, since this master-power finds
expression through faculties various in kind and still more various in
grade of development, its outcome assumes many shapes and hues,--just
as crystallized alumina becomes here ruby and there sapphire, by minute
admixtures of different coloring substances.

We assume the validity of this prime source of belief. Why not? Here is
a great natural product, human belief; we treat it precisely as we do
other natural products; we judge, that, like these, it has its law and
justification. We assume that it is to be studied as Lyell studies the
earth's crust, or Agassiz its life, or Mueller its languages. As our
author shuns metaphysical, so do we shun metapsychical inquiries. We do
not presume to go behind universal fact, and inquire whether it has any
business to be fact; we simply endeavor to see it in its largest and
most interior aspect, and then accept it without question.

But M. Comte made the discovery that this great product of man's
spiritual nature is nothing but the spawn of his self-conceit: that it
is purely gratuitous, groundless, superfluous, and therefore in the
deepest possible sense lawless, Mr. Buckle follows his master, for such
Comte really is. Proclaiming Law everywhere else, and, from his extreme
partiality to the word, often lugging it in, as it were, by the ears, he
no sooner arrives at these provinces than he instantly faces the other
way, and denies all that he has before advocated. Of a quadruped he will
question not a hair, of a fish not a scale; everywhere else he will
accept facts and seek to cooerdinate them; but when he arrives at the
great natural outcome and manifestation of man's spirit, then it is in
an opposite way that he will not question; he simply lifts his eyebrows.
The fact has no business to be there! It signifies nothing!

Why this reversal of position? First, because, if consciousness be
allowed, free-will must be admitted; since the universal consciousness
is that of freedom to choose. But there is a larger reason. In
accordance with his general notions, personality must be degraded,
denuded, impoverished,--that so the individual may lie passive in the
arms of that society whose laws he is ambitious to expound. Having
robbed the soul of choice, he now deprives it of sight; having denied
that it is an originating source of will, he now makes the complementary
denial, that it is a like source of knowledge; having first made it
helpless, he now proceeds to make it senseless. And, indeed, the two
denials belong together. If it be true that the soul is helpless, pray
let us have some kind drug to make it senseless also. Nature has dealt
thus equally with the stone; and surely she must design a like equality
in her dealings with man. Power and perceiving she will either give
together, or together withhold.

But how does our author support this denial? By pointing to the great
varieties in the outcome of consciousness. There is no unity, he says,
in its determinations: one believes this, another that, a third somewhat
different from both; and the faith that one is ready to die for, another
is ready to kill him for. And true it is that the diversities of human
belief are many and great; let not the fact be denied nor diminished.

But does such diversity disprove a fundamental unity? All modern science
answers, No. How much of outward resemblance is there between a fish
and a philosopher? Is not the difference here as wide as the widest
unlikenesses in human belief? Yet Comparative Anatomy, with none to deny
its right, includes philosopher and fish in one category: they both
belong to the vertebrate sub-kingdom. See what vast dissimilarities are
included in the unity of this vertebrate structure: creatures that swim,
creep, walk, fly; creatures with two feet, with four feet, with no feet,
with feet and hands, with hands only, with neither feet nor hands;
creatures that live in air only, or in water only, or that die at once
in water or air; creatures, in fine, more various and diverse than
imagination, before the fact, could conceive. Yet, throughout this
astonishing, inconceivable variety, science walks in steady perception
of a unity extending far toward details of structure. The boor
laughs, when told that the forefoot of his horse and his own hand are
essentially the same member. A "Positive Philosopher" laughs, when
told that through Fetichism and Lutheranism there runs a thread of
unity,--that human belief has its law, and may be studied in the spirit
of science. But it is more than questionable whether the laugh is on
their side.[A]

[Footnote A: Comte did, indeed, profess to furnish a central law of
belief. It is due, he said, to the tendency of man to flatter his own
personality by foisting its image upon the universe. This, however, is
but one way of saying that it is wholly gratuitous,--that it has no root
in the truth of the world. But universal truth and universal law are the
same; and therefore that which arises without having any root in eternal
verity is lawless in the deepest possible sense,--lawless not merely as
being irregular in its action, but in the deeper and more terrible sense
of being in the universe without belonging there. To believe, however,
that any product of universal dimensions can be generated, not by the
truth of the universe, but by somewhat else, is to believe in a Devil
more thoroughly than the creed of any Calvinist allows. But this is
quite in character. Comte was perhaps the most superstitious man of
his time; superstition runs in the blood of his "philosophy"; and Mr.
Buckle, in my opinion, escapes and denounces the black superstitions of
ignorance only to fall into the whited superstitions of sciolism.]

But our author does not quit this subject without attempting to adduce
a specific instance wherein consciousness proves fallacious. Success,
however, could hardly be worse; he fails to establish his point, but
succeeds in discrediting either his candor or his discrimination. "Are
we not," he says, "in certain circumstances, conscious of the existence
of spectres and phantoms; and yet is it not generally admitted that such
beings have no existence at all?" Now I should be ashamed to charge a
scholar, like Mr. Buckle, with being unaware that consciousness does not
apply to any matter which comes properly under the cognizance of the
senses, and that the word can be honestly used in such applications only
by the last extreme of ignorant or inadvertent latitude. _Conscious_ of
the existence of spectres! One might as lawfully say he is "conscious"
that there is a man in the moon, or that the color of his neighbor's
hair is due to a dye. Mr. Buckle is undoubtedly honest. How, then, could
he, in strict philosophical discussion, employ the cardinal word in
a sense flagrantly and even ludicrously false, in order to carry his
point? It is partly to be attributed to his controversial ardor, which
is not only a heat, but a blaze, and frequently dazzles the eye of his
understanding; but partly it is attributable also to an infirmity in
the understanding itself. He shows, indeed, a singular combination of
intellectual qualities. He has great external precision, and great
inward looseness and slipperiness of mind: so that, if you follow his
words, no man's thought can be clearer, no man's logic more firm and
rapid in its march; but if you follow strictly the _conceptions_, the
clearness vanishes, and the logic limps, nay, sprawls. It is not merely
that he writes better than he thinks, though this is true of him; but
the more characteristic fact is that he is a master in the forms of
thought and an apprentice in the substance. Read his pages, and you will
find much to admire; read under his pages, and you will find much not to
admire.

It appears from the foregoing what Mr. Buckle aims to accomplish at the
outset. His purpose is to effect a thorough degradation of Personality.
Till this is done, he finds no clear field for the action of social
law. To discrown and degrade Personality by taking away its two grand
prerogatives,--this is his preliminary labor, this is his way of
procuring a site for that edifice of scientific history which he
proposes to build.

But what an enormous price to pay for the purchase! If there is no
kingdom for social law, if there is no place for a science of history,
till man is made unroyal, till the glory is taken from his brow, the
sceptre from his right hand, and the regal hopes from his heart, till
he is made a mere serf and an appanage of that ground and territory
of circumstance whereon he lives and labors,--why, then a science of
history means much the same with an extinction of history, an extinction
of all that in history which makes it inspiring. The history of rats and
mice is interesting, but not to themselves,--interesting only to man,
and this because he is man; but if men are nothing but rats and mice,
pray let them look for cheese, and look out for the cat, and let
goose-quills and history alone.

But the truth is that Person and Society are mutually supporting facts,
each weakened by any impoverishment of its reciprocal term. Whenever a
_real_ history of human civilization is written, they will thus appear.
And Mr. Buckle, in seeking to empty one term in order to obtain room
for the other, was yielding concessions, not to the pure necessities of
truth, but to his own infirmity as a thinker.

Having, however, taken the crown and kingdom from Personality, our
philosophical Warwick proceeds to the coronation of his favorite
autocrat, Society. His final proposition, which indeed is made
obscurely, and as far as possible by implication, is this:--

3. _That Society is the Real Source of Individual Action_. A proposition
made obscurely, but argued strenuously, and altogether necessary for
the completion of his foundation. He attempts proof by reference to the
following facts:--that in a given kingdom there occur, year after year,
nearly the same number of murders, suicides, and letters mailed without
direction, and that marriages are more frequent when food is low and
wages high, and so conversely. This is the sum total of the argument on
which he relies here and throughout his work: if this proves his point,
it is proven; if otherwise, otherwise.

To begin with, I admit the facts alleged. They are overstated; there
_is_ considerable departure from an exact average: but let this pass. I
will go farther, and admit, what no one has attempted to show, that an
average in these common and outward matters proves the like regularity
in all that men do and think and feel. This to concentrate attention
upon the main question.

And the main question is, What do these regular averages signify? Do
they denote the dominancy of a social fate? "Yea, yea," cry loudly the
French fatalists; and "Yea, yea," respond with firm assurance Buckle &
Co. in England; and "Yea," there are many to say in our own land. Even
Mr. Emerson must summon his courage to confront "the terrible statistics
of the French statisticians." But I live in the persuasion that these
statistics are extremely innocent, and threaten no man's liberty. Let us
see.

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