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fluctuations, one thing, and one alone, which endures for ever. The actions of bad men produce only temporary evil, the actions of good men only temporary good; and eventually the good and the evil together subside, are neutralised by subsequent generations, absorbed by the incessant movement of future ages. But the discoveries of great men never leave us; they are immortal, they contain those eternal truths which survive the shock of empires, outlive the struggles of rival creeds, and witness the decay of successive religions. All these have their different measures and their different standards; one set of opinions for one age, another set for another. they phi away like a dream; they are as the fabric of a vision, which leaves not a rack behind. The discoveries [308] of genius alone remain: it is to them we owe all that we now have, they are for all ages and all times; never young and never old, they bear the seeds of their own life; they flow on in a perennial and undying stream; they are essentially cumulative, and, giving birth to the additions which they subsequently receive, they thus influence the most distant posterity, and after the lapse of centuries produce more effect than they were able to do even at the moment of their promulgation. Let us not allow the emotions stirred up by Mr. Buckle's eloquence to blind us to the real meaning of his grand words. We must note that the "eternal truths" do not concern morality, or that "flux and reflux" of human action which neutralises itself and forms no element of progress. They have still less to do with religion; for they "outlive the struggles of rival creeds, and witness the decay of successive religions," but they are "the discoveries of genius"—not barren truths regarding intellect and will, and such-like metaphysical matters, which yield no fruit, but truths which teach man how to conquer and make use of nature, which tell him what he may do with water, andsteam, and electricity, and wood, and coal, and iron, and gas, and skins, and horns. They are "essentially cumulative":one man begins where the last ended, and adds improvement on improvement—not as in morals, where all men begin afresh, and no real advance is made. Again, it is evident that individual happiness or misery forms no element in Mr. Buckle's computation: he eliminates both vice and virtue, not only because they balance one another,but because, after a century or two, no vestiges are left of the greatest crimes or most splendid acts ofgoodness. Mr. Buckle, therefore, does not contemplate the action, but the result; not the life or thinking of the man, but the work he has done, or the theory he has thought out. Where no trace remains of the work, nothing was done worth speaking of. Having thus made the individual soul of no account in his investigations on the history of human progress, it is clear that only one manner of looking at mankind remains: if they are not to be viewed as persons in detail, they must be considered as bodies in mhi. hence not [309] individual acts, but their statistics engage his attention. It is not personal doings, but sums total, that he seeks. But here we will let him speak for himself:— the actions of individuals are greatly affected by their moral hilings and by their phiions, but these being antagonistic to the phiions and hilings 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 .