The work which Mr. Buckle contemplated was designed to supply this _desideratum_ in respect to History. It was an endeavor to discover 'the Principles which govern the character and destiny of nations,' an effort 'to bring up this great department of inquiry to a level with other departments,' 'to accomplish for the history of man something equivalent, or at all events analogous to, what has been effected by other inquirers for the different branches of Natural Science,' and 'to elevate the study of history from its present crude and informal state,' and place 'it in its proper rank, as the head and chief of all the Sciences.' At the outset of his undertaking, we have ample evidence that the capacious-minded Englishman had fixed upon no less a labor than '_to solve the great problem of affairs; to detect those hidden circumstances which determine the march and destiny of nations; and to find, in the events of the past, a key to the proceedings of the future, which is nothing less than to unite into a single science all the laws of the moral and physical world_.' He was thus bent, doubtless with only a vague apprehension of the nature of the problem, on the discovery of that Unitary Law, whose apprehension is so anxiously awaited, _which is to cement the various branches of our Knowledge into a Universal Science, and furnish an Exact basis for all our thinking_. The Method which Mr. Buckle employed in the prosecution of his magnificent design was the Inductive. He made 'a collection of historical and scientific facts,' drew from them such conclusions as he thought they suggested and authorized; and then applied the Generalizations thus obtained to the elucidation of the career of various countries. When we consider the nature of the work undertaken and the means by which it was to be achieved, we can hardly deny, that this attempt to create a Science of History was, in a distinguishing sense, the most gigantic intellectual effort which the world has ever been called to witness. The domain of investigation was almost new. The point of Observation entirely so. Vast masses of Facts encumbered it, aggregated in orderless heaps--orderless, at least, so far as his uses were subserved. Comte had, indeed, brought the different departments of inquiry into proximately definite relations in obedience to an _abstract_ and _Static_ Law; but while this labor was, in other respects, an essential preliminary to Mr. Buckle's undertaking, it was of little _immediate_ value in an attempt to secure the direct solution of the most intricate and complex questions of Concrete _dynamical_ Sociology, involving the unstable and shifting contingencies of individual activity. The whole of the intellectual accumulations of the centuries may be said to have been piled about the English Thinker, and he was to discover in and derive from them the unerring Law or Laws which should serve to explain, with at least something approaching