"Buckle is not the first who has attempted to treat the unscientific character of History, the 'methodless matter,' as an ancient writer names it, by the method of exhibiting vital phenomena under points of view analogous to those which are the starting-point of the exact sciences. But a notion which others have incidentally broached under some formula about 'natural growth,' or carried out in the very inadequate and merely figurative idea of 'the inorganic; what still others, as Comte in his attractive 'Philosophie Positive,' have developed speculatively, Buckle undertakes to ground in a comprehensive historical exposition. … {1650} He purposes to raise History to a science by showing how to demonstrate historical facts out of general laws. He paves the way for this by setting forth that the earliest and rudest conceptions touching the course of human destiny were those indicated by the ideas of chance and necessity, that in all probability' out of these grew later the 'dogmas' of free-will and predestination, that both are in a great degree 'mistakes,' or that, as he adds, 'we at least have no adequate proof of their truth.' He finds that all the changes of which History is full, all the vicissitudes which have come upon the human race, its advance and its decline, its happiness and its misery, must be the fruit, of a double agency, the working of outer phenomena upon our nature, and the working of our nature upon outer phenomena. He has confidence that he has discovered the 'laws' of this double influence, and that he has therefore elevated the History of mankind to a science. … Buckle does not so much leave the freedom of the will, in connection with divine providence, out of view, but rather declares it an illusion and throws it overboard. Within the precincts of philosophy also something similar has recently been taught. A thinker whom I regard with personal esteem says: 'If we call all that an individual man is, has and performs A, then this A arises out of _a + x, a_ embracing all that comes to the man from his outer circumstances: from his country, people, age, etc., while the vanishingly little _x_ is his own contribution, the work of his free will.' However vanishingly small this _x_ may be, it is of infinite value. Morally and humanly considered it alone has value. The colors, the brush, the canvas which Raphael used were of materials which he had not created. He had learned from one and another master to apply these materials in drawing and painting. The idea of the Holy Virgin and of the saints and angels, he met with in church tradition. Various cloisters ordered pictures from him at given prices. That this incitement alone, these material and technical conditions and such traditions and contemplations, should 'explain' the Sistine Madonna, would