Henry Thomas Buckle

“ For the great luminary, even as it shines in the heaven, is not a more noble or a more powerful object than is the intellect of man in this nether world. It is to the human intellect, and to that alone, that every country owes its knowledge. And what is it but the progress and diffusion of knowledge which has given us [203] our arts, our sciences, our manufactures, our laws, our opinions, our manners, our comforts, our luxuries, our civilization; in short, everything that raises us above the savages, who by their ignorance are degraded to the level of the brutes with which they herd? ”

“ But the moment they turn to the past, they see in those good old times which are now gone by, many sources of consolation. There they find a period in which their glory is without a rival. When they look at their pedigrees, their quarterings, their escutcheons; when they think of the purity of their blood, and the antiquity of their ancestors—they experience a comfort which ought amply to atone for any present inconvenience. The tendency of this is very obvious, and has shown itself in the history of every aristocracy the world has yet seen. ”

“ The many will be ruined, that the few may be pleased. While every thing is splendid above, all will be rotten below. Fine pictures, noble palaces, touching dramas—these may for a time be produced in profusion, but it will be at the cost of the heart and strength of the nation. Even the class for whom the sacrifice has been made, will soon decay. Poets may continue to sing the praises of the prince who has bought them with his gold. It is, however, certain that men who begin by losing their independence, will end by losing their energy. ”

“ He bore to the old systems of philosophy precisely the same relation that Luther bore to the old systems of religion. He was the great reformer and liberator of the European intellect. To prefer, therefore, even the most successful discoverers of physical laws to this great innovator and disturber of tradition, is just as if we should prefer knowledge to freedom, and believe that science is better than liberty. We must, indeed, always be grateful to those eminent thinkers, to whose labours we are indebted for that vast body of physical truths which we now possess. ”

“ The progress of the intellect supplies a new object of veneration; the old worship of rank is rudely disturbed, and its superstitious devotees are taught to bow the knee before what to them is the shrine of a strange god. The hall of science is the temple of democracy. Those who come to learn, confess their own ignorance, abrogate in some degree their own superiority, and begin to perceive that the greatness of men has no connexion with the splendour of their titles, or the dignity of their birth ”

“ It was in vain that the government, yielding some points of real importance, adopted measures by which the church was controlled, the power of the clergy diminished, and even the order of the jesuits suppressed. It was in vain that the crown now called to its councils, for the first time, men imbued with the spirit of reform; men, like Turgot and Necker, whose wise and liberal proposals would, in calmer days, have stilled the agitation of the popular mind. ”

“ Certain feelings there are of our common nature, which even their slavish loyalty cannot eradicate, and which, from time to time, urge them to resist injustice. Such instincts are happily the inalienable lot of humanity, which we cannot forfeit, if we would, and which are too often the last resource against the extravagances of tyranny. And this is all that Spain now possesses. The Spaniards, therefore, resist, not because they are Spaniards, but because they are men. ”

“ It is, therefore, clear, that the burden of proof lies not on those who assert the eternal regularity of nature, but rather on those who deny it; and who set up an imaginary period, to which they assign an imaginary catastrophe, during which they say new laws were introduced and a new order established. Such gratuitous assumptions, even if they eventually turn out to be true, are in the present state of knowledge unwarrantable, and ought to be rejected, as the last remains of those theological prejudices by which the march of every science has in its turn been hindered. ”

“ All the idolatry, all the ceremonials, all the pomp, all the dogmas, and all the traditions by which religion is retarded, will give them no disquietude, because they consider the opinions that are checked to be equally false with those that are favoured. Why should they, to whom transcendental truths are unknown, labour to remove the superstitions which darken the truths? Such a generation, so far from attacking ecclesiastical usurpations, would rather look on the clergy as convenient tools to ensnare the ignorant and control the vulgar. ”

“ Surely, food and clothes are as necessary for the body as literature is for the mind. Why, then, should we call upon government to encourage those who write our books, any more than to encourage those who kill our mutton and mend our garments? The truth is, that the intellectual march of society is, in this respect, exactly analogous to its physical march. In some instances a forced supply may, indeed, create an unnatural want. ”

“ In no age have literary men been awarded with such profuseness as in the reign of Louis XIV.; and in no age have they been so mean-spirited, so servile, so utterly unfit to fulfil their great vocation as the apostles of knowledge and the missionaries of truth. The history of the most celebrated authors of that time proves that, notwithstanding their acquirements, and the power of their minds, they were unable to resist the surrounding corruption. To gain the favour of the king, they sacrificed that independent spirit which should have been dearer to them than life. ”

“ Their intellect must be robust indeed, if it does not wither in the sickly atmosphere of a court. Their attention being concentrated on their master, they insensibly contract those habits of servility which are suited to their position; and, as the range of their sympathies is diminished, the use and action of their genius become impaired. To them submission is a custom, and servitude a pleasure. In their hands, literature soon loses its boldness, tradition is appealed to as the ground of truth, and the spirit of inquiry is extinguished. ”

“ What we think of the clergy will depend upon themselves; but will have no connection with what we think of Christianity. We look on the clergy as a body of men who, notwithstanding their disposition to intolerance, and notwithstanding a certain narrowness incidental to their profession, do undoubtedly form part of a vast and noble institution, by which the manners of men have been softened, their sufferings assuaged, their distresses relieved. As long as this institution performs its functions, we are well content to let it stand. ”

“ A people who regard the past with too wistful an eye, will never bestir themselves to help the onward progress; they will hardly believe that progress is possible. To them, antiquity is synonymous with wisdom, and every improvement is a dangerous innovation. In this state, Europe lingered for many centuries; in this state, Spain still lingers. Hence the Spaniards are remarkable for an inertness, a want of buoyancy, and an absence of hope, which, in our busy and enterprizing age, isolate them from the rest of the civilized world. Believing that little can be done, they are in no hurry to do it. ”

“ It is clear that their progress was checked by the prevalence of those feelings which are fatal to all knowledge, because, looking on antiquity as the sole receptacle of wisdom, they degrade the present in order that they may exaggerate the past: feelings which destroy the prospects of man, stifle his hopes, damp his curiosity, chill his energies, impair his judgment, and, under pretence of humbling the pride of his reason, seek to throw him back into that more than midnight darkness from which his reason alone has enabled him to emerge. ”

“ What marvel if such empty understandings should be busied with ribbons, and stars, and crosses; if this noble should yearn after the Garter, and that noble pine for the Golden Fleece; if one man should long to carry a wand in the precincts of the court, and another man to fill an office in the royal household; while the ambition of a third is to make his daughter a maid-of-honour, or to raise his wife to be mistress of the robes? ”

“ Therefore it is, that to write the history of a country without regard to its intellectual progress, is as if an astronomer should compose a planetary system without regard to the sun, by whose light alone the planets can be seen, and by whose attraction they are held in their course, and compelled to run in the path of their appointed orbits. ”

“ What can kings and ministers know about those immense branches of knowledge, to cultivate which with success is often the business of an entire life? How can they, constantly occupied with their lofty pursuits, have leisure for such inferior matters? Is it to be supposed that such acquirements will be found among statesmen, who are always engaged in the most weighty concerns; sometimes writing despatches, sometimes making speeches, sometimes organising a party in the parliament, sometimes baffling an intrigue in the privy-chamber? ”

“ The English rebellion was headed by men, whose tastes, habits, and associations, being altogether popular, formed a bond of sympathy between them and the people, and preserved the union of the whole party. In France the sympathy was very weak, and therefore, the union was very precarious. What sort of sympathy could there be between the mechanic and the peasant, toiling for their daily bread, and the rich and dissolute noble, whose life was passed in those idle and frivolous pursuits which debased his mind, and made his order a byword and a reproach among the nations? ”

“ Whenever a tendency arises to prefer what comes from without to what comes from within, and thus to aggrandize matter at the expense of mind, there will also be a tendency to believe that an institution which hampers our opinions is less hurtful than one which controls our acts. Precisely in the same way, men who reject the fundamental truths of religion, will care little for the extent to which those truths are perverted. Men who deny the existence of the Deity and the immortality of the soul, will take no heed of the way in which a gross and formal worship obscures those sublime doctrines. ”

“ An insurrection is too often the mad and passionate effort of ignorant persons, who are impatient under some immediate injury, and never stop to investigate its remote and general causes. But a revolution, when it is the work of the nation itself, is a splendid and imposing spectacle, because to the moral quality of indignation produced by the presence of evil, it adds the intellectual qualities of foresight and combination ”

“ In France, in the eighteenth century, literature was the last resource of liberty. In England, if our great authors should prostitute their abilities by inculcating servile opinions, the danger would no doubt be considerable, because other parts of society might find it difficult to escape the contagion. Still, before the corruption had spread, there would be time to stop its course, so long as we possessed those free political institutions, by the mere mention of which the generous imagination of a bold people is easily fired. ”

“ If, however, it should be out of repair, or if it should be found inadequate to the shifting circumstances of an advancing society, we retain both the power and the right of remedying its faults; we may, if need be, remove some of its parts; but we would not, we dare not, tamper with those great religious truths which are altogether independent of it; truths which comfort the mind of man, raise him above the instincts of the hour, and infuse into him those lofty aspirations which, revealing to him his own immortality, are the measure and the symptom of a future life. ”

“ To me, indeed, it has always appeared, that the delay of the Revolution is one of the most striking proofs history affords of the force of established habits, and of the tenacity with which the human mind clings to old associations. For, if ever there existed a government inherently and radically bad, it was the government of France in the eighteenth century. ”

“ If those who adopt this view had taken the pains to study the history of Europe in its original sources, they would have learned, that the liberality of every sect depends, not at all on its avowed tenets, but on the circumstances in which it is placed, and on the amount of authority possessed by its priesthood. The Protestant religion is, for the most part, more tolerant than the Catholic, simply because the events which have given rise to Protestantism have at the same time increased the play of the intellect, and therefore lessened the power of the clergy. ”

“ He will see how, under the high-sounding names of loyalty and religion, lurk the deadly evils which those names have always concealed, but which it is the business of the historian to drag to light and expose. A blind spirit of reverence, taking the form of an unworthy and ignominious submission to the Crown and the Church, is the [593] capital and essential vice of the Spanish people. It is their sole national vice, and it has sufficed to ruin them. From it all nations have grievously suffered, and many still suffer. But nowhere in Europe, has this principle been so long supreme as in Spain. ”

“ Thus, it has been found, that the best way of arriving at a theory of disease is by beginning with the theory of health; and that the foundation of all sound pathology must be first sought in an observation, not of the abnormal, but of the normal functions of life. Just in the same way, it will, I believe, be found, that the best method of arriving at great social truths, is by first investigating those cases in which society has developed itself according to its own laws, and in which the governing powers have least opposed themselves to the spirit of their times. ”

“ Her large and powerful intellect, cultivated to its highest point by reflection and study, taught her the true measure of affairs, and enabled her to see, that to make a government flourish, its councillors must be men of ability and of virtue; but that if these two conditions are fulfilled, the nobles may be left to repose in the enjoyment of their leisure, unoppressed by those cares of the state for which, with a few brilliant exceptions, they are naturally disqualified by the number of their prejudices and by the frivolity of their pursuits. ”