Buckle as the Father of Scientific History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Sunday 24 November 2024 is the 203rd anniversary of the birth of Henry Thomas Buckle (24 November 1821–29 May 1862), who was born in London on this date in 1821. Buckle died at only forty years of age in Damascus, Syria.
Buckle stands a little bit outside the usual networks of influence since he was educated at home by this mother, and later was an autodidact. As a young man he was an accomplished chess player and defeated a couple of masters. Buckle traveled extensively in Europe with his mother and sister, later with friends, studying the history and customs of each country he visited, which is the perfect education for an historian and a philosopher of history. Buckle’s primary work was The History of Civilization in England, printed in three volumes starting in 1857. The work remained unfinished, and was planned to extend over 14 volumes when completed.
The book was remarkable in its time for being naturalistic in its approach, and for Buckle’s persistent effort to find a scientific way to study history. His understanding of his project was that he was writing a new kind of history of civilization in England, so he saw himself as an historian, not as a philosopher, and not as a philosopher of history, though he found himself doing philosophy of history as he tried to work out a scientific methodology for studying history. Volume one contains most of what’s interesting from a theoretical perspective, including most of what Buckle has to say about this methodology. Volume two is mostly about French history, and volume three is mostly about Scottish history. I haven’t seen a breakdown of Buckle’s projected plan for all fourteen volumes, and I don’t know if any such plan exists.
The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has an admirably systematic account of what Buckle was trying to do, given in ten points. I’m going to go through these ten points, and as I go through them I’m going to reframe Buckle in more contemporary terms to try to show the ongoing relevance of his work, which in its original terms now seems dated. I will follow each of the ten theses with a quote from Buckle. What follows are my paraphrases of the Encyclopedia Britannica article, and not the exact language that was used.
1. Little has been done to make history scientific.
Buckle wrote:
“Since the early part of the eighteenth century, a few great thinkers have indeed arisen, who have deplored the backwardness of history, and have done everything in their power to remedy it. But these instances have been extremely rare: so rare, that in the whole literature of Europe there are not more than three or four really original works which contain a systematic attempt to investigate the history of man according to those exhaustive methods which in other branches of knowledge have proved successful, and by which alone empirical observations can be raised to scientific truths.”
2. Human actions no less than natural processes are governed by fixed laws.
Buckle wrote:
“…the actions of men, being determined solely by their antecedents, must have a character of uniformity, that is to say, must, under precisely the same circumstances, always issue in precisely the same results. And as all antecedents are either in the mind or out of it, we clearly see that all the variations in the results, in other words, all the changes of which history is full, all the vicissitudes of the human race, their progress or their decay, their happiness or their misery, must be the fruit of a double action; an action of external phenomena upon the mind, and another action of the mind upon the phenomena.”
Buckle develops this theme by playing off divine predestination against what he calls the metaphysical dogma of freewill, which he also calls he infallibility of consciousness. According to Buckle, both divine predestination and the dogma of free will distract us from a naturalistic determinism that sees history in terms of laws.
3. Environmental factors are the chief influences on intellectual development.
Buckle wrote:
“If we inquire what those physical agents are by which the human race is most powerfully influenced, we shall find that they may be classed under four heads: namely, Climate, Food, Soil, and the General Aspect of Nature; by which last, I mean those appearances which, though presented chiefly to the sight, have, through the medium of that or other senses, directed the association of ideas, and hence in different countries have given rise to different habits of national thought. To one of these four classes, may be referred all the external phenomena by which Man has been permanently affected. The last of these classes, or what I call the General Aspect of Nature, produces its principal results by exciting the imagination, and by suggesting those innumerable superstitions which are the great obstacles to advancing knowledge. And as, in the infancy of a people, the power of such superstitions is supreme, it has happened that the various Aspects of Nature have caused corresponding varieties in the popular character, and have imparted to the national religion peculiarities which, under certain circumstances, it is impossible to efface.” (Chap. II)
Buckle is one of the links in the chain of environmental determinism that I have talked about in relation to Montesquieu, Ellsworth Huntington, William McNeill, and Jared Diamond, so this isn’t unprecedented, but Buckle gave it its modern form.
4. In Europe, man has been more powerful than nature, while in other parts of the world nature has been more powerful than man.
Buckle wrote:
“…I have looked at civilization as broken into two vast divisions: the European division, in which Man is more powerful than Nature; and the non-European division, in which Nature is more powerful than Man. This has led us to the conclusion, that national progress, in connexion with popular liberty, could have originated in no part of the world except in Europe; where, therefore, the rise of real civilization, and the encroachments of the human mind upon the forces of nature, are alone to be studied. ”
This is the familiar idea that the tropical climate is enervating and produces weak human types. It does seem to be the case that temperate environments are more of a spur to development than tropical environments, whatever explanation we may provide for this. The explanation that Buckle would give would differ from the explanation that Jared Diamond would give, but both are still working in a framework that demands a naturalistic explanation for climatological differences among civilizations.
5. Europe has advanced because mental laws have increased in influence as physical laws have deceased in influence.
Buckle wrote:
“…mental laws are, in Europe, more powerful than physical laws; and that, in the progress of civilization, their superiority is constantly increasing, because advancing knowledge multiplies the resources of the mind, but leaves the old resources of nature stationary. On this account, we have treated the mental laws as being the great regulators of progress; and we have looked at the physical laws as occupying a subordinate place, and as merely displaying themselves in occasional disturbances, the force and frequency of which have been long declining, and are now, on a large average, almost inoperative. Having, by this means, resolved the study of what may be called the dynamics of society into the study of the laws of the mind, we have subjected these last to a similar analysis; and we have found that they consist of two parts, namely, moral laws and intellectual laws.”
We could reformulate this in a way that was more in line with twenty-first century presuppositions and make it a bit less reductivist, though it remains determinist. If we treat mental laws as emergents from consciousness, and consciousness as an emergent from physical laws, we have something like Buckle’s position, and the more a society is determined by later emergents compared to earlier emergents, which recede into the background, the more what Buckle calls mental laws predominate. Since we saw earlier that environmental factors are the chief influences on intellectual development, there’s a transitive relationship from environmental factors to intellectual development to mental laws. Whether we treat this transitive relationship in reductive terms or emergentist terms, it works either way.
6. An empirical method is necessary to grasp the mental laws that guide human history.
Buckle wrote:
“…when men… began to collect observations less minute, but more comprehensive, then it was that the great law of nature, for which during many centuries they had vainly searched, first became unfolded to their view… If, therefore, we wish to effect anything of real moment, it becomes necessary that we should discard those old schemes, the insufficiency of which is demonstrated by experience as well as by reason; and that we should substitute in their place such a comprehensive survey of facts as will enable us to eliminate those disturbances which, owing to the impossibility of experiment, we shall never be able to isolate.” (Chap. IV)
Buckle contrasts what he calls a metaphysical method to an empirical method, in order to show the inadequacy of the metaphysical method. In the bit I’ve quoted he makes important observations on what the method of a scientific history would have to be. Experiment isn’t possible, and the facts we survey must be comprehensive. This is something that I’ve thought about for a long time, and I don’t yet have any quantitative way to formulate what Buckle calls more comprehensive observations. Put the question like this: What kind of observations are relevant to civilization? Not what Buckle calls minute observations, but more comprehensive observations. Whether or not we follow Buckle’s method, anyone who attempts to give a scientific account of history or civilization will have to confront these problems.
7. Progress is due to intellectual activity and not to moral effort.
Buckle wrote:
“…phenomena which the progress of society presents, the moral laws have been steadily and invariably subordinate to the intellectual laws, there arises a strong presumption that in inferior matters the same process has been followed. To prove this in its full extent, and thus raise the presumption to an absolute certainty, would be to write, not an Introduction to history, but the History itself. The reader must, therefore, be satisfied for the present with what, I am conscious, is merely an approach towards demonstration; and the complete demonstration must necessarily be reserved for the future volumes of this work: in which I pledge myself to show that the progress Europe has made from barbarism to civilization is entirely due to its intellectual activity”
Traditional history has favored explanations in terms of moral forces, but Buckle wants to kick this to the curb and show that it is intellectual activity that is the driver of history.
8. The individual is an expression of the age, defined by it and not defining it.
Buckle wrote:
“The actions of individuals are greatly affected by their moral feelings and by their passions; but these being antagonistic to the passions and feelings of other individuals, are balanced by them; so that their effect is, in the great average of human affairs, nowhere to be seen; and the total actions of mankind, considered as a whole, are left to be regulated by the total knowledge of which mankind is possessed.”
Here we can find a resemblance to Karl Popper’s argument for historical indeterminism based on the accumulation of knowledge. Buckle was a determinist to at least some degree, but his emphasis falls on how laws intrinsic to the intellectual sphere come to supersede laws intrinsic to the physical sphere, and for this reason knowledge comes to be more influential than environmental circumstances.
9. Religion, literature, and government are products and not causes of civilization
Buckle wrote:
“…although religion, literature, and legislation do, undoubtedly, modify the condition of mankind, they are still more modified by it. Indeed, as we have clearly seen, they, even in their most favourable position, can be but secondary agents; because, however beneficial their apparent influence may be, they are themselves the product of preceding changes, and their results will vary according to the variations of the society on which they work.” (Chap. VI)
If we think about the origins of civilization, we inevitably come to the chicken-and-egg question of what came first, and this what Buckle is facing. Buckle’s resolution is that religion, literature, and government are essentially epiphenomena of civilization, though Buckle’s unambiguous solution to the chicken-and-egg difficulty is conditioned by his willingness to accept that these forces do modify history, but they are more modified than modifiers.
10. Progress is a function of the interaction of skepticism and credulity.
Making a distinction between skepticism and credulity doesn’t quite capture Buckle’s meaning, and it’s somewhat reductive to frame this theme in this way, but it’s a theme that runs through the book, though by many different names. For example, Buckle often calls credulity “the protective spirit,” to which he gives a broad significance. Sometimes the protective spirit is manifested by superstition, and sometimes it’s more like what Nietzsche called antiquarian history: “The origin of veneration is wonder and fear. These two passions, either alone or combined, are the ordinary source of veneration ” And, “…whatever increases in any country the amount of dangerous disease, has an immediate tendency to strengthen superstition, and aggrandize the imagination at the expense of the understanding.”
For Buckle, the protective spirit was more developed in France, while England saw a greater development of skepticism. The Anglo-Frankish rivalry throughout the Middle Ages and up to Buckle’s time illustrates the distinction between skepticism and the protective spirit, and the interaction between England and France is this distinction playing out in real time.
“…in an analysis of the French Revolution, I shall point out how that great event was a reaction against the protective spirit; while, as the materials for the reaction were drawn from England, we shall also see in it the way in which the intellect of one country acts upon the intellect of another; and we shall arrive at some results respecting that interchange of ideas which is likely to become the most important regulator of European affairs.”
So much for the ten theses ascribed to Buckle. Buckle himself didn’t summarize his work in this way, but these ideas do represent some of the major themes that Buckle developed throughout his work. Buckle died at only forty years of age in Damascus, Syria. He was traveling in the Holy Land with his friend John S. Stuart-Glennie, and Stuart-Glennie was with Buckle when he died. Not long after Buckle’s death, Stuart-Glennie, in his 1875 book Pilgrim-memories: Or, Travel and Discussion in the Birth-countries of Christianity with the Late Henry Thomas Buckle, recounted his travels with Buckle in Egypt, Sanai, Judea, Palestine, and Lebanon. Stuart-Glennie writes that he had conceived a project not unlike Buckle’s, although focused on law rather than the history of civilization. In the Preface of this book he describes what he takes to be both Buckle’s and his own motivation:
“But the discovery even of an Ultimate Law of History was not, with me, an end, but only a means. For, through all the weak or worldly sophisms of contemporary presentations of Christianity, it was clear that the backbone of it, as a religion, is a certain theory or philosophy of History. It was clear that this Christian Philosophy of History is opposed, in the very conceptions that are its bases, to that New Philosophy of History which, especially since Hume and Kant, it has been the great and variously labouring aim of Modem Science to construct. And, so, just as the Christian Synthesis of History has been, it appeared that a Scientific Synthesis of history — expressed in the characteristic scientific form of a Law — would be, in the moral or emotional presentation of it, an Ideal, a Religion. Clear it was, therefore, that the scientific inquirer who has for his aim the discovery of an Ultimate Law of History, must aim also, if he has a true consciousness of the nature of his task, at discovering what will alone be an adequate basis of that New Ideal rendered necessary by the incredibility now of the Christian theory of History. And clear also it was that, conversely, the religious inquirer who would gain a more satisfying Ideal than that Christian one which Science makes more and more incredible, must, if he has a true knowledge of the conditions of such an Ideal, aim, first of all, at the discovery of an Ultimate Law of History. And the second, therefore, of my three main objects in recording these Pilgrim-Memories is at the Holy Places themselves, to bring home to the reader the untenableness of the Christian theory of History, and so to prepare the way for that New Ideal which gradually dawns on us as we gain a glimpse of the Law of Progress, the Law of Human Development.”
This is a fascinating testimonial, and I don’t know how much of it Buckle himself would have endorsed, but as the two were traveling together it seems likely that all of this came out during long conversations on trains and steamships. Gilbert J. Garraghan, in his A guide to Historical Method, additionally places Buckle in the company of Marx:
“Buckle, and Marx, viewing history from an entirely materialistic angle, sought to reduce historical processes to the rigid uniformity characteristic of physical law. The attempt was futile, as must be any attempt that runs counter to nature; but the mirage of some ironclad law or laws, as yet undiscovered, that will unravel the skein of history and make its processes as clear as the solution of a geometrical problem, has still power to intrigue the unwary.”
Wilhelm Dilthey, while also differing from Buckle, gave a somewhat more sympathetic account of Buckle’s project:
“He asserts that among historians ‘a strange idea prevails, that their business is merely to narrate events, which they may occasionally enliven by such moral and political reflections as seem likely to be useful.’ He wants to transform history into an exact science, like natural history; he wants to demonstrate what is law-governed in historical events and thereby put himself in the position of predicting them. He expresses the conviction that the law of necessity, that is, a cause-and-effect relation, prevails universally in the realms of historical as well as of natural events; that we must conceive of each individual action as the inevitable effect of certain causes that for their part are in turn effects of other events; that consequently we must totally exclude chance as well as providence, or direct divine intervention from the sphere of history.” (Collected Works, Vol. IV, Hermeneutics and the Study of History, p. 262)
It’s interesting that Dilthey doesn’t simply reject Buckle’s approach, as many would, and many have; rather, he finds its utility limited and Buckle’s conclusions wrongheaded. But the project itself Dilthey doesn’t reject, implying that if the limitations were addressed and conclusions were revised, Buckle’s approach to history might be valuable.
Perhaps Buckle’s most dedicated critic was Lord Acton, who inveighed against Buckle in two essays, “Mr. Buckle’s Thesis and Method” and “Mr. Buckle’s Philosophy of history” both published in The Rambler in 1858, while Buckle was still living. Lord Acton said that Buckle, “… is a gentleman who has had the rare fortune of jumping to celebrity at a bound, by the publication of an elaborate book on a profound subject.” Acton is clear about this dislike of Buckle and scientific history:
“The whole system of positive philosophy is the work of under-educated, or half-educated men, adepts in physical science, but ignorant of the principles of any other, who insist that all science must have the same method as theirs, and that metaphysical realities must be measured and explained by physical laws. We state this to show that Mr. Buckle’s absurdities and dishonesties are not his own, but those of his school.”
With all these 19th century tributes to Buckle’s influence, be that influence beneficent or malign, it’s interesting that not many people read Buckle today. He was the cutting edge of scientific history in the middle of the 19th century. Sometimes Buckle is even called the Father of Scientific History, but we’ve seen in several episodes that there’s been a lot of confusion surrounding the very idea that history could be scientific. In my episode on Dilthey I said that Dilthey thought Hegel, Schleiermächer, and Comte were too scientific. Leo Strauss implied that Collingwood was a representative of scientific history. Many have claimed that Toynbee’s work embodies a scientific or empirical method. Henri Frankfort complained that Spengler and Toynbee both were, “…under the spell of scientific notions.” All of these are claims that no one would make today, but we could probably find equally fantastical claims about what is and what is not science, and what scientific history is or ought to be.
Not only do historians and philosophers disagree whether or not history is or could be scientific, they also disagree on whether or not this is or would be a good thing. But the great unanswered question is not exactly whether history is or should be a science, but rather, if it is a science, what kind of science is it? And this question in turn points not so much to philosophy of history as to philosophy science. Here we have to face a hard truth: science itself is an unscientific as is history. I could be seriously misunderstood on this point, so I need to try to clarify this.
Just as there is no science of history, there is no science of science, and that means that our understanding of science — and our understanding of history — is pre-paradigmatic, to use a Kuhnian term. It seems paradoxical that the individual sciences can be as well defined as any part of human knowledge, while the enterprise of science taken on the whole remains essentially unknown to us. If we could christen this paradox with a memorable name maybe the realization of not knowing what we are doing when we do science and history would get some traction and some theoretical attention.
Whether or not this is a paradox — i.e., that the special sciences are scientific but science itself is not — it shouldn’t surprise us, as this is baked into the very substance of science. Science progresses when it manages to hit on a productive set of abstractions that we can use to leverage a very narrow way of looking at the world. I said that science sometimes “manages to hit on a productive set of abstractions,” and this is key here, because, given the lack of a science of science, there is no method of converging upon optimally productive abstractions; we can only cast around for them. Finding productive abstractions is fundamentally idiosyncratic: some individuals have a much better feel for converging on productive abstractions than others — better than most of the rest of humanity — and this idiosyncratic efficacy is again a function of science remaining an art rather than being a science. We should keep this in mind when we consider the ancient question of whether history is an art or a science, because science itself is an art, and will remain an art unless or until we have a rigorous science of science. In the absence of a rigorous science of science, it would be nice at least to have a proof that a rigorous science of science is possible, or that it is impossible, but we don’t even have this much.
The narrower our science, the narrower the scientific abstractions we employ, the more likely we are to make progress. The wider and more comprehensive our science, the more comprehensive the scientific abstractions we employ, the less likely we are to make quantifiable progress. There are a couple of things going on here. The most comprehensive concepts are employed in philosophy, and at some point in the narrowing of the meaning of concepts we cross the threshold from doing philosophy to doing science. Passing in the opposite direction, when we start from the narrow concepts employed in the special sciences and pass on to more comprehensive concepts, we pass a threshold from doing science to doing philosophy. Also, the more comprehensive the concept, the more foundational it is, and simple, foundational concepts are related to other simple, foundational concepts, and this makes them difficult grasp, difficult to elaborate, and difficult to systematize.
The absence of a science of science not only means that finding foundational concepts is idiosyncratic, it also means that we have no theoretically adequate way of organizing science on the whole. This in turn means that we have no taxonomy of the sciences, within which taxonomy we could, if we had one, locate scientific history. In order to be able to say what kind of science history is or ought to be, we would have to have a taxonomy of the sciences, but we don’t have a systematic taxonomy of the sciences. There are a great many attempted taxonomies of science, but none of them are entirely satisfactory, and none of them are universally adopted. Think of all the proposed scientific taxa that you may have heard at one time or another: empirical science, observational science, experimental science, natural science, physical science, social science, human sciences, earth sciences, life sciences, formal sciences, and so on. Where does one leave off and the other begin?
Obviously, these categories overlap and intersect like Wittgenstein family resemblances. It might be good enough for you to say that all the sciences exhibit a family resemblance, and it’s this that makes them science, and not the common possession of some essential property. This is certainly a line of argument we could pursue, but it doesn’t settle the question. It doesn’t give us a theoretically adequate taxonomy of the sciences. Each philosopher who comes to the problem seems to end up formulating his own taxonomy that differs from all prior taxonomies of science, all of which have been unsatisfying.
Taxonomies are like definitions: they help us organize our thought, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t continue to think about them. The absence of a definition of science and a taxonomy of the sciences on which all philosophers agree doesn’t mean that science is impossible, or the scientific progress isn’t possible. It doesn’t even mean that philosophy of science isn’t possible. In fact, we need philosophy of science as much as we do precisely because we can’t define science or divide its branches into a systematic taxonomy. The definition of science and a taxonomy of the sciences remain philosophical questions precisely because they have not been made into scientific questions. Consequently, our knowledge of science is incomplete.
This is a distinct state-of-affairs from our knowledge of the world won through science being incomplete, but both of these are the case: our knowledge of science is incomplete and our knowledge of the world is incomplete. To put it another way, we’re pursuing knowledge of the world with an imperfect instrument that we don’t understand, which means that any knowledge gained thereby is also imperfect. There may be an irreducible paradox that makes a science of science impossible, in which case we could never be able to say with certainty what kind of science a science of history ought to be. The paradox is this: What kind of science would a science of science be? In other words, we need to have a taxonomy of science before we can make science scientific, but we can’t make science scientific until we know what kind of science a science of science should be.
There can be no resolution to this problem in the form in which I’ve stated it, and that makes it a paradox. Of course, you can reject my framing of the problem, but seem to be in the position mathematicians found themselves in after Gödel demonstrated his incompleteness theorems. A lot of people working in the foundations of mathematics a century ago felt like the bottom dropped out of the discipline with the proof of the incompleteness theorems. Mathematician and philosopher of science Hermann Weyl said of mathematics after Godel:
“Since then the prevailing attitude has been one of resignation. The ultimate foundations and the ultimate meaning of mathematics remain an open problem; we do not know in what direction it will find its solution, nor even whether a final objective answer can be expected at all. ‘Mathematizing’ may well be a creative activity of man, like music, the products of which not only in form but also in substance are conditioned by the decisions of history and therefore defy complete objective rationalization.”
We could say analogously that in history we are left to mere historicizing in the absence of ultimate foundations. Earlier I said that sciences have to converge on productive abstractions, but it is the nature of abstractions that they abstract from much of the world, which means that they are intrinsically incomplete. Wilhelm Windelband wrote about this in a way that really strikes me as having touched on the heart of the matter:
“No description of facts can ever completely comprise or imitate the reality with which it is concerned: but it can weave the selected constituents into a form which agrees with their real interconnexion. This is true, however, in the highest degree, of theories. The generic concepts and the laws of Natural Science are of course abstractions which, as such, cut off from all particulars, do not ‘exist’: but they comprise all these particulars, they hold good for them, they are the order or system in which the actual nature of the things stands. Finally, the human sciences abstract from the endless mass of events interconnexions which, as they present them to us — aloof from and unaffected by all the other things round about them — have never come to pass.”
If we follow Weyl and Windelband, we may have to hesitate over the ancient and annoying question of whether history is an art or a science. We can’t at present demonstrate that history isn’t an art, and our inability to show that history is or can be a science is a spur to further thought. Reflecting on the nature of history may be particularly conducive to formulating a conception of science. History has always had an embattled status, and that is fertile ground for reflection. In my episode on Wilhelm Windleband I talked about Windelband being the source of the familiar distinction between the nomothetic or lawlike and universal forms of science, and the idiographic, or particularistic forms of science. So Windelband produced a bimodal taxonomy of the sciences, and in this way he offered a definite answer to the question of what kind of science history should be: it should be an idiographic science. We might not agree with Windelband on this point, but at least he saw the problem that Buckle left and attempted to give a definitive answer to it. In this way, Buckle is not only the Father of Scientific History, but also the source of a fruitful line of inquiry in philosophy of history and philosophy of science.
