In the announcement of his inability to fulfil the great promises made in the former volume, we find, likewise, the indications of a nature full of lofty grandeur. He who has known the scholar's hopes, the student's struggles, and the author's ambition, may form some faint conception of what must have been the feelings of the great Historian when the conviction came to him, first faintly foreshadowed and then deepening to a reality, that the prize for which he had contended--and such a prize! which had seemed, too, at times, almost within his grasp--was destined forever to elude him. Frankly to acknowledge failure in such a struggle, was in itself great; to acknowledge it when the cries of his assailants were still ringing in his ears, and when it might have been measurably concealed, was still greater; to acknowledge it in words which betray no trace of disappointed _personal_ ambition, but only a regret that the final avenue to truth should not have been opened, was heroic even to sublimity. The pages of Buckle's 'History of Civilization' which record the answer to his traducers and the acknowledgment of his disappointment in relation to what he should be able to achieve, will stand in the annals of literary history as a memorable instance in which is significantly exhibited one factor of that highest religious spirit so much needed in our day--_devotion to the intellectual discovery of all truth for truth's sake_. The following is the passage in question: 'In the moral world, as in the physical world, nothing is anomalous; nothing is unnatural; nothing is strange. All is order, symmetry, and law. There are opposites, but there are no contradictions. In the character of a nation, inconsistency is impossible. Such, however, is still the backward condition of the human mind, and with so evil and jaundiced an eye do we approach the greatest problems, that not only common writers, but even men from whom better things might be hoped, are on this point involved in constant confusion. Perplexing themselves and their readers by speaking of inconsistency, as if it were a quality belonging to the subject which they investigate, instead of being, as it really is, a measure of their own ignorance. It is the business of the historian to remove this ignorance by showing that the movements of nations are perfectly regular, and that, like all other movements, they are solely determined by their antecedents. If he cannot do this, he is no historian. He may be an annalist, or a biographer, or a chronicler, but higher than that he cannot rise, unless he is imbued with that spirit of science which teaches, as an article of faith, the doctrine of uniform sequence; in other words, the doctrine that certain events having already happened, certain other events corresponding to them will also happen. To seize this idea