Henry Thomas Buckle
42 quotes
Biography
Henry Thomas Buckle was an English historian, the author of an unfinished History of Civilization and a strong amateur chess player. He is sometimes called "the Father of Scientific History".
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
"Of all the various ways which the imagination has distorted truth, there is none which has worked so much harm as an exaggerated respect for past ages. This reverence for antiquity is repugnant to every maxim of reason, and is merely the indulgence of a poetic sentiment in favour of the remote and unknown."
"Our knowledge is composed not of facts, but of the relations which facts and ideas bear to themselves and to each other; and real knowledge consists not in an acquaintance with facts, which only makes a pedant, but in the use of facts, which makes a philosopher."
"And, notwithstanding a few exceptions, we do undoubtedly find that the most truly eminent men have had not only their affections, but also their intellect, greatly influenced by women. I will go even farther; and I will venture to say that those who have not undergone that influence betray a something incomplete and mutilated. We detect, even in their genius, a certain frigidity of tone; and we look in vain for that burning fire, that gushing and spontaneous nature with which our ideas of genius are indissolubly associated. Therefore, it is, that those who are most anxious that the boundaries of knowledge should be enlarged, ought to be most eager that the influence of women should be increased, in order that every resource of the human mind may be at once and quickly brought into play."
"When the interval between the intellectual classes and the practical classes is too great, the former will possess no influence, the latter will reap no benefits."
"Henry Thomas Buckle expired at on the last day of May in the present year. ...There has passed away from the world one of the heroes, if not one of the martyrs of learning. ...[T]he announcement of his death has cast a shadow upon many who knew him only as an indefatigable wooer of knowledge, a bold explorer in the regions of historical and social science.<!--pp. 337-338-->"
"Having gained a prize for mathematics, and being desired by his parents to name his own additional reward, he claimed the privilege of being removed from school, and receiving thenceforth his education at home. ...Mr. Buckle ...was either dissatisfied with his instructors, or resolved to be the sole architect of his own mind. His tutors were dismissed; and he, a boy of fourteen years, set forth without a pilot upon the sea of knowledge.<!--p. 338-->"
"In about four years his multifarious studies began to converge towards one focus—the intellectual progress and civilization of mankind. ...[I]ts fulfilment became the object of his life.<!--p. 338-->"
"[H]is book [History of Civilization]... must always be regarded as an extraordinary proof of a mind at once sanguine and persevering.<!--p. 338-->"
"Mr. Buckle was happily released by his father's liberality; and by his death, in 1840, he came into possession of a handsome competence, of wealth, indeed, to one whose sole expenditure was upon books.<!--p. 338-->"
"[I]n the year 1857—that is to say, about twenty years after the idea of a History of Human Progress in England first dawned upon him—committed the result of his steady ten-hours-a-day labour to the press, and followed the first volume with a second, published in 1861.<!--p. 339-->"
"Mr. Buckle had assailed more than one order of mankind: the political economist and the lawyer have, perhaps, long since ceased to resent, but the Scotch are not likely to forget, nor are the clergy prone to forgive, such an antagonist.<!--p. 339-->"
"With many readers the author has doubtless passed for a hard man, dealing with men's actions and thoughts as with so many links in the chain of causation, with the aspects of life as the mere products or phenomena of Fate or Necessity.<!--p. 339-->"
"His body he from earliest youth had treated as a slave, his mind as a sovereign: for the one no sacrifice as too great; for the other, no privations were thought excessive.<!--p. 339-->"
"He discerned, or at least he imagined, that a great void in the history of human progress awaited the filling-up: and however opinions may vary upon his fitness for his self-imposed task there can be no question of the ardour and sincerity he brought to its performance.<!--p. 340-->"
"His recluse life entailed upon his writings some serious disadvantages. If from his 'study' he did not 'rail at human kind,' he formed, from his long commerce with books alone, harsh and one-sided opinions of classes, that earlier and more free intermixtures with them would have softened or corrected.<!--p. 340-->"
"Of the clergy he saw only one, and that not the more favourable side. He regarded them writers or preachers alone, and not as active and humanizing elements in society.<!--p. 340-->"
"He is right in ascribing to dogmatic theology dark, cruel, ignorant and groundless theories, alike at variance with a divine Author and dishonourable to human nature.<!--p. 340-->"
"He is wrong when he represents the orator in the pulpit, or the scholar in the closet, as hard, bigoted, and severe as his doctrines.<!--p. 340-->"
"The extracts from the Scotch divines that fill so large a space in the notes of Mr. Buckle's second volume, are atrocious enough to prove that Torquemada and St. Dominic were not better disposed to rack and burn their fellow men than the Gillespies, the Guthries, the Halyburtons, and the Rutherfords...<!--p. 340-->"
"His heart was not closed or narrowed to the great interests of his kind. He may have weighed classes of them in an ill-adjusted balance, but to the progress of men in whatsoever delivers the human race from bondage to idols of the market, of the temple, or the tribe, he was never indifferent.<!--p. 341-->"
"In the cause of what he believed to be civilization, his energy was unflagging, his sympathy intense.<!--p. 341-->"
"Of the plan and execution of his History we are not in a condition to speak; we have portions only of the Introduction to it. Much that in the Prolegomena is incomplete or inaccurate, crude or rash, would probably, after maturer experience and enlarged insight, have been supplied or corrected in the historical sequel.<!--p. 341-->"
"[C]onceding for the moment that the term civilization is sufficiently intelligible, if not very precise, Mr. Buckle's manner of handling the subject is somewhat capricious and irregular.<!--p. 341-->"
"The second volume is... little more than an episode of the first; with a few inconsiderable changes, it might have stood alone as a record of the effects of perverted religion in Spain or Scotland.<!--p. 342-->"