It has been already hinted that the chief defect in this great mass of historical work is the want of a philosophy of history. The unmanageable volume of material almost smothers the intellect. An attempt to make good the defect was made by Henry Thomas Buckle, in his _History of Civilisation_ (1857-1861), with results not altogether satisfactory. Buckle was a man of vast reading and tenacious memory; but no knowledge, however extensive, could at that time have sufficed to do what he attempted. He soon discovered this himself, and what he has executed is a mere fragment of his daring design. Even so, it is larger than his materials justified. In accounting for Buckle's failure, stress has often been laid upon the fact that his education was private. This is a little pedantic. Grote, whose history has been accepted at the universities as the best available, was of no university. Mill, one of the men who have most influenced thought in this century, was of none either. Gibbon, perhaps the greatest of historians, has put on record how little he owed to Oxford; and Carlyle has told us with characteristic vigour how unprofitable he thought his university of Edinburgh. The men who did not go to a university have done good work; and the men who did go to one have declared that they owed little or nothing to the education there received. In the face of such facts it is impossible to account so for the failure of Buckle. The real reason, besides the cardinal fact that the attempt was premature, is that Buckle, though he had the daring of the speculator's temperament, had neither its caution nor its breadth. The great speculative geniuses of the world have been prudent as well as bold. No one is bolder than Aristotle, but no one is more careful to lay first a broad foundation for his speculations. Buckle did not use his great knowledge so. His account of the causes of things always rouses suspicion because it is far too simple. He never understood how complex the life of a nation is; and when he came to write he practically rejected the greater part of his knowledge and used only the small remainder. He was moreover a man of strong prejudices. He could not endure the ecclesiastical type of mind or the ecclesiastical view of things; and his account of civilisation in Scotland is completely vitiated by his determination to regard the Church, before the Reformation and after the Reformation alike, as merely a weight on the wheel, not a source of energy and forward movement.