lent itself to magnificent dramatic creations; but it explained nothing. It substituted the work of the genius for the miraculous intervention of Providence, but, apart from certain abstract formulae such as Truth and Right, knew nothing of why or how. It is but dealing in words to say that the meaning of it all is God's revelation of Himself. Granting that, what is the process? Why does it so slowly reveal the Right of the middle ages (as in slavery for instance) to be the Wrong to-day? Carlyle stands to Bossuet as the sage to the myth. Hegel got no closer to realities. His idealistic scheme of history, which makes religion the keynote of progress, and describes the function of each--Judaism to typify duty, Confucianism order, Mahommedanism justice, Buddhism patience, and Christianity love--does not account for the facts of the history enacted by the devotees. It characterizes, not the real process of evolution, but an ideal which history has not realized. Besides, it does not face the question how far religion itself is a product or a cause, or both combined. In the middle of the century two men sought to incorporate in their philosophy the physical basis which Hegel had ignored in his spiritism--recognizing that life is conditioned by an environment and not an abstraction for metaphysics. H. T. Buckle, in his _History of Civilization in England_ (1857), was the first to work out the influences of the material world upon history, developing through a wealth of illustration the importance of food, soil and the general aspect of nature upon the formation of society. Buckle did not, as is generally believed, make these three factors dominate all history. He distinctly stated that "the advance of European civilization is characterized by a diminishing influence of physical laws and an increasing influence of mental laws," and "the measure of civilization is the triumph of mind over external agents." Yet his challenge, not only to the theologian, but also to those "historians whose indolence of thought" or "natural incapacity" prevented them from attempting more than the annalistic record of events, called out a storm of protest from almost every side. Now that the controversy has cleared away, we see that in spite of Buckle's too confident formulation of his laws, his pioneer work in a great field marks him out as the Augustine of the scientific age. Among historians, however, Buckle's theory received but little favour for another generation. Meanwhile the economists had themselves taken up the problem, and it was from them that the historians of to-day have learned it. Ten years before Buckle published his history, Karl Marx had already formulated the "economic theory of history." Accepting with reservation Feuerbach's attack on the Hegelian "absolute idea," based on materialistic grounds (_Der Mensch ist, was er isst_), Marx was led to the conclusion that the causes of that process