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Updated: May 11, 2025
The extraordinary genius of Bichat, to whom more than any other we owe this new method of study, does not require Mr. Buckle's testimony to impress the practitioner with the importance of its achievements. I have heard a very wise physician question whether any important result had accrued to practical medicine from Harvey's discovery of the circulation.
We are angry with them; and we betray, in being so, an uneasy misgiving that there may be more truth in those opinions than we like to allow. Mr. Buckle's general theory was something of this kind: When human creatures began first to look about them in the world they lived in, there seemed to be no order in any thing. Days and nights were not the same length.
Now true as all this is, I never think myself impowered to excommunicate thereupon either the post-chaise, or its driver nor do I take it into my head to swear by the living G.., I would rather go a-foot ten thousand times or that I will be damn'd, if ever I get into another but I take the matter coolly before me, and consider, that some tag, or rag, or jag, or bolt, or buckle, or buckle's tongue, will ever be a wanting or want altering, travel where I will so I never chaff, but take the good and the bad as they fall in my road, and get on: Do so, my lad! said I; he had lost five minutes already, in alighting in order to get at a luncheon of black bread, which he had cramm'd into the chaise-pocket, and was remounted, and going leisurely on, to relish it the better.
But I have nothing to do here with the universal 'Conservation of Force. The conception of the nervous organs as stores of will-made power does not raise or need so vast a discussion. Still less are these principles to be confounded with Mr. Buckle's idea that material forces have been the main-springs of progress, and moral causes secondary, and, in comparison, not to be thought of.
That something is always wrong in a French post-chaise, upon first setting out. Or the proposition may stand thus: A French postilion has always to alight before he has got three hundred yards out of town. What's wrong now? Diable! a rope's broke! a knot has slipt! a staple's drawn! a bolt's to whittle! a tag, a rag, a jag, a strap, a buckle, or a buckle's tongue, want altering.
One cannot but feel the force of Buckle's law of "the physical aspects of nature" in this sad country.
Buckle's Generalizations as will be hereafter shown a half-truth, a correct statement of one side of a verity, good so far as it goes, but essentially false when put for the whole, as in the present instance, or when held so as to exclude the opposite half-truth.
Buckle's first chapter, passim. 'Cornhill Magazine, for June and July, 1861. 'Lay Sermons, p. 158.
We are angry with them; and we betray, in being so, an uneasy misgiving that there may be more truth in those opinions than we like to allow. Mr. Buckle's general theory was something of this kind: When human creatures began first to look about them in the world they lived in, there seemed to be no order in anything. Days and nights were not the same length.
I remember as a boy being captivated by that charming corrective to this view of historical development, Buckle's History of Civilization, which in recent years has often recurred to my mind, despite the fact that many of his theories are now somewhat discredited. Buckle, if I remember right, almost eliminates the personal factor in the life of nations.
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