was incapable of other than the most generous impulses of a noble
philanthropy toward his maligners and traducers.

In the announcement of his inability to fulfil the great promises made
in the former volume, we find, likewise, the indications of a nature
full of lofty grandeur. He who has known the scholar's hopes, the
student's struggles, and the author's ambition, may form some faint
conception of what must have been the feelings of the great Historian
when the conviction came to him, first faintly foreshadowed and then
deepening to a reality, that the prize for which he had contended--and
such a prize! which had seemed, too, at times, almost within his
grasp--was destined forever to elude him. Frankly to acknowledge failure
in such a struggle, was in itself great; to acknowledge it when the
cries of his assailants were still ringing in his ears, and when it
might have been measurably concealed, was still greater; to acknowledge
it in words which betray no trace of disappointed _personal_ ambition,
but only a regret that the final avenue to truth should not have been
opened, was heroic even to sublimity. The pages of Buckle's 'History of
Civilization' which record the answer to his traducers and the
acknowledgment of his disappointment in relation to what he should be
able to achieve, will stand in the annals of literary history as a
memorable instance in which is significantly exhibited one factor of
that highest religious spirit so much needed in our day--_devotion to
the intellectual discovery of all truth for truth's sake_.

The following is the passage in question:

'In the moral world, as in the physical world, nothing is
anomalous; nothing is unnatural; nothing is strange. All is order,
symmetry, and law. There are opposites, but there are no