Non Fiction Authors From England

"Maxwell probably first encountered Quetelet in an article by... John Herschel... (...familiar with Quetelet as a fellow astronomer). Later, in 1857, Maxwell read a newly published book by... Henry Thomas Buckle. Buckle, himself clearly influenced by Quetelet, believed that science could discover the "laws of the human mind" and that human actions are a part of "one vast system of universal order." ...Though Maxwell found Buckle's book "bumptious," he recognized it as a source of original ideas, and the statistical reasoning Buckle applied to society seemed just the thing... needed to deal with molecular motion."

"[I]n the year 1857—that is to say, about twenty years after the idea of a History of Human Progress in England first dawned upon him—committed the result of his steady ten-hours-a-day labour to the press, and followed the first volume with a second, published in 1861."

"Henry Thomas Buckle expired at on the last day of May in the present year. ...There has passed away from the world one of the heroes, if not one of the martyrs of learning. ...[T]he announcement of his death has cast a shadow upon many who knew him only as an indefatigable wooer of knowledge, a bold explorer in the regions of historical and social science."

"Of all the various ways which the imagination has distorted truth, there is none which has worked so much harm as an exaggerated respect for past ages. This reverence for antiquity is repugnant to every maxim of reason, and is merely the indulgence of a poetic sentiment in favour of the remote and unknown."

"Our knowledge is composed not of facts, but of the relations which facts and ideas bear to themselves and to each other; and real knowledge consists not in an acquaintance with facts, which only makes a pedant, but in the use of facts, which makes a philosopher."

"And, notwithstanding a few exceptions, we do undoubtedly find that the most truly eminent men have had not only their affections, but also their intellect, greatly influenced by women. I will go even farther; and I will venture to say that those who have not undergone that influence betray a something incomplete and mutilated. We detect, even in their genius, a certain frigidity of tone; and we look in vain for that burning fire, that gushing and spontaneous nature with which our ideas of genius are indissolubly associated. Therefore, it is, that those who are most anxious that the boundaries of knowledge should be enlarged, ought to be most eager that the influence of women should be increased, in order that every resource of the human mind may be at once and quickly brought into play."

"Mr. Buckle had assailed more than one order of mankind: the political economist and the lawyer have, perhaps, long since ceased to resent, but the Scotch are not likely to forget, nor are the clergy prone to forgive, such an antagonist."

"With many readers the author has doubtless passed for a hard man, dealing with men's actions and thoughts as with so many links in the chain of causation, with the aspects of life as the mere products or phenomena of Fate or Necessity."

"His body he from earliest youth had treated as a slave, his mind as a sovereign: for the one no sacrifice as too great; for the other, no privations were thought excessive."

"With Comte, the people cannot move intelligently out of the leading-strings of the government; with Buckle, the sole function of a government is to express as best it may the sum of the national will. Comte... has insisted on the subjection of man to his antecedents; but he has neglected the connexion between man and natural laws."

"The recklessness of the assertion that Buckle owed everything to Comte, is obvious to whoever will consider what each has achieved in the science of history. Indeed their similarity is only incidental. ...[T]heir subjects overlapped each other: Comte in seeking for a rational form of government; and Buckle in showing how every movement of mankind is subject to law."

"If we cannot inscribe it on the roll of historians or philosophers of the highest order, yet the name of HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE merits a high place on the list of earnest seekers for Truth."

"There are many points upon which Comte and Buckle are one; perhaps they are even more than those in which they differ: but while the former are mostly subsidiary, the latter are mostly fundamental. Comte's laws of civilization are evolved as a necessary deduction... Buckle... proves the predictability of human actions by statistics. ...Buckle ...discovers the laws of civilization first inductively, and then ...reverses the process and proves them deductively. ...Every step Buckle takes is strictly reasoned, and his proof is more positive and verified than any Comte chooses ...Buckle's work stands on the same basis as any other scientific work, while Comte with all his positive claim ...[has] no inductive complement to his deductive proof."

"Mr. Buckle fights against ...[the ecclesiastical body] with the whole armoury of distrust and defiance. ...[S]ome of his charges were ill-considered and unfounded; but these, the faults of seclusion and inexperience, do not, in the main, affect his assertion, that no class of men is fit to be entrusted with irresponsible power, and of all classes, the clergy least."

"[W]e are not likely again to see so much learning and ability employed upon themes which remunerate the student with neither present profit nor honour. Be what they may the faults of the book, the merits of the author are sterling. He sought knowledge for its own sake: for knowledge he gave up his youth, his talents, his fortune, and possibly his life."

"Buckle's chief merit is that he first made a science of history by connecting it with political economy and statistics, and has shown how every advance is intellectual from the people, and never in the opposite direction. Indeed, one of the truths he most insists upon, is, that it is better to make a harmful law with the concurrence of the people, than to make a good one which they do not like."

"s did not deter, nor shadows intimidate him; whatever, in his judgment... retarded... the progress of men, he denounced; whatever, in his opinion, was likely to accelerate or secure it, he advocated."

"His voice was unmusical and his manner rather defiant. But one could not be five minutes in a room with him without being aware that a talker unusually informed with book knowledge was present."

"The doctrines of Auguste Comte are not palatable on this side of the Channel; and although Mr. Buckle accepted M. Comte's creed with reservation, he is indebted to it for some of his theories."

"In his anxiety, if not indeed his determination, to find a comprehensive idea, Mr. Buckle often strains, if he does not misrepresent facts. He is too prone to assume that men under similar circumstances will be similar themselves, and leaves scarcely a margin for the disturbances of passion, custom, or accident."

"[S]ure were Mr. Buckle's strictures on the and to draw down upon him the wrath of North Britain."

"How far he failed or how far he succeeded in his attempt to construct a science of history, we do not pretend to determine: we are merely pointing to the high and arduous object he set before himself."

"Hero-worshippers... have no reason to be pleased with his speculations, since he resolves the course of history into cycles and a system, and ascribes but little permanent influence to individual soldiers, statesmen, or saints."

"For the Englishman there are only two available ways to deal with the genius and the “great man”: either democratically, in the style of Buckle, or religiously, in the style of Carlyle."

"[H]e sinned the sin of excessive generalization. It may be true that in certain cycles or shorter periods of time the sums of human acts are strangely alike. It may be true also that statistics afford to history one of its most sure and instructive auxiliaries. But it is no less certain that such tabular records are not only in their infancy, but as regards former times, either do not exist, or are most scanty and precarious aids to truth. At the best, also, they represent a few only of the elements of social life, and probably centuries of exact observation must elapse before they can be permitted to supersede the other grounds, moral, intellectual, and religious, on which history hitherto as been constructed."

"Of the plan and execution of his History we are not in a condition to speak; we have portions only of the Introduction to it. Much that in the Prolegomena is incomplete or inaccurate, crude or rash, would probably, after maturer experience and enlarged insight, have been supplied or corrected in the historical sequel."

"[C]onceding for the moment that the term civilization is sufficiently intelligible, if not very precise, Mr. Buckle's manner of handling the subject is somewhat capricious and irregular."

"In the cause of what he believed to be civilization, his energy was unflagging, his sympathy intense."

"The second volume is... little more than an episode of the first; with a few inconsiderable changes, it might have stood alone as a record of the effects of perverted religion in Spain or Scotland."

"He is wrong when he represents the orator in the pulpit, or the scholar in the closet, as hard, bigoted, and severe as his doctrines."

"The extracts from the Scotch divines that fill so large a space in the notes of Mr. Buckle's second volume, are atrocious enough to prove that Torquemada and St. Dominic were not better disposed to rack and burn their fellow men than the Gillespies, the Guthries, the Halyburtons, and the Rutherfords..."

"The discrepancies and inconveniences attendant on the vagueness of the term civilization might... have been avoided had the work been entitled a 'History of the Aspects of Society in England.' There would then have been no previous question about the import of a title sufficiently elastic to include the era when Britons painted their bodies with woad and the era when they assumed trousers and paletots."

"His heart was not closed or narrowed to the great interests of his kind. He may have weighed classes of them in an ill-adjusted balance, but to the progress of men in whatsoever delivers the human race from bondage to idols of the market, of the temple, or the tribe, he was never indifferent."

"He discerned, or at least he imagined, that a great void in the history of human progress awaited the filling-up: and however opinions may vary upon his fitness for his self-imposed task there can be no question of the ardour and sincerity he brought to its performance."

"His recluse life entailed upon his writings some serious disadvantages. If from his 'study' he did not 'rail at human kind,' he formed, from his long commerce with books alone, harsh and one-sided opinions of classes, that earlier and more free intermixtures with them would have softened or corrected."

"Of the clergy he saw only one, and that not the more favourable side. He regarded them writers or preachers alone, and not as active and humanizing elements in society."

"He is right in ascribing to dogmatic theology dark, cruel, ignorant and groundless theories, alike at variance with a divine Author and dishonourable to human nature."

"He perceived that history in its best forms is but an imperfect record of the thoughts and deeds of men. ...It was Mr. Buckle's object to collect and place these phenomena upon a scientific basis, to discover the law of their growth, progress, and decline, to show why on some soils they withered, why on others they bore fruit an hundred-fold."

"Quote by Chipsterni Fishainrian Meddelein."

"She is one of the most brilliant poets ever and has inspired thousands to write poetry on the level of the Vogons and cause widespread fear of such good poetry."

"I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year, "Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown." And he replied, "Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.""

"I heard the quotation read in a summary of the speech. I thought the words sounded familiar and suddenly it dawned on me that they were out of my little book."

"Knowing that the life that remained to him could not be of great length, he said, “I try to increase it in weight, I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it. … The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.”"

"The peasantry … were the true philosophers of the modern world, the heirs to classical sages such as Seneca and Socrates. Only they knew how to live, precisely because they knew nothing much about anything else."

"The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called Montaigne a writer who put “a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.”"

"The unusual treatment began soon after his birth, when Micheau was sent to live with a humble family in a nearby village. Having a peasant wet-nurse was normal enough, but Montaigne’s father wanted his son to absorb an understanding of commoners’ ways along with their breast milk, so that be would grow up comfortable with the people who most needed a seigneur’s help. Instead of bringing a nurse to the baby, therefore, he sent the baby to the nurse, and left him there long enough to be weaned. Even at the christening, Pierre [Montaigne’s father] had “people of the lowest class” hold the infant over the font. From the start, Montaigne had the impression at once of being a peasant among peasants, and of being very special and different. This is the mixture of feelings that would stay with him for life. H felt ordinary, but knew that the very fact of realizing his ordinariness made him extraordinary."

"Finding his mind so filled with “chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose,” he [Montaigne] decided to write them down, not directly to overcome them, but to inspect their strangeness at his leisure. So he picked up his pen; the first of the Essays was born."

"As Seneca put it, life does not pause to remind you that it is running out. The only one who can keep you mindful of this is you."

"The hedonistic approach to education did make a difference to him [Montaigne]. Having been guided early in life by his own curiosity alone, he grew up to be an independent-minded adult, following his own path in everything rather than deferring to duty and discipline."

"The trick is to maintain a kind of naïve amazement at each instant of experience—but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm."