and the means by which it was to be achieved, we can hardly deny, that
this attempt to create a Science of History was, in a distinguishing
sense, the most gigantic intellectual effort which the world has ever
been called to witness. The domain of investigation was almost new. The
point of Observation entirely so. Vast masses of Facts encumbered it,
aggregated in orderless heaps--orderless, at least, so far as his uses
were subserved. Comte had, indeed, brought the different departments of
inquiry into proximately definite relations in obedience to an
_abstract_ and _Static_ Law; but while this labor was, in other
respects, an essential preliminary to Mr. Buckle's undertaking, it was
of little _immediate_ value in an attempt to secure the direct solution
of the most intricate and complex questions of Concrete _dynamical_
Sociology, involving the unstable and shifting contingencies of
individual activity. The whole of the intellectual accumulations of the
centuries may be said to have been piled about the English Thinker, and
he was to discover in and derive from them the unerring Law or Laws
which should serve to explain, with at least something approaching
precision and clearness, the kaleidoscopic phases of human existence.

Only one generally known effort in the realm of Thought bears any
comparison to this, examined in reference to the vigor, breadth, and
variety of the mental faculties which it called into requisition. Viewed
in connection with the work of the founder of the Positive School, we
may say, without any disparagement to the comprehensive abilities of the
French Philosopher, that the task undertaken by the English Historian
required a tenacity of intellectual grasp, a steadiness of mental
vision, a scope of generalizing power, an all-embracing scholarship, a
marvellous accumulation of Facts, and a wonderful readiness to handle
them, which even the prodigious labors of the Positive Philosophy did
not demand. Comte had, indeed, like Buckle, to arrange the Facts of the