A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive · John Stuart Mill
168 P. 271.
283 Buckle’s _History of Civilization_, i., 30. 284 I have been assured by an intimate friend of Mr. Buckle that he would not have withheld his assent from these remarks, and that he never intended to affirm or imply that mankind are not progressive in their moral as well as in their intellectual qualities. “In dealing with his problem, he availed himself of the artifice resorted to by the Political Economist, who leaves out of consideration the generous and benevolent sentiments, and founds his science on the proposition that mankind are actuated by acquisitive propensities alone,” not because such is the fact, but because it is necessary to begin by treating the principal influence as if it was the sole one, and make the due corrections afterward. “He desired to make abstraction of the intellect as the determining and dynamical element of the progression, eliminating the more dependent set of conditions, and treating the more active one as if it were an entirely independent variable.” The same friend of Mr. Buckle states that when he used expressions which seemed to exaggerate the influence of general at the expense of special causes, and especially at the expense of the influence of individual minds, Mr. Buckle really intended no more than to affirm emphatically that the greatest men can not effect great changes in human affairs unless the general mind has been in some considerable degree prepared for them by the general circumstances of the age; a truth which, of course, no one thinks of denying. And there certainly are passages in Mr. Buckle’s writings which speak of the influence exercised by great individual intellects in as strong terms as could be desired.
285 Essay on Dryden, in Miscellaneous Writings, i., 186. 286 In the _Cornhill Magazine_ for June and July, 1861. 287 It is almost superfluous to observe, that there is another meaning of the word Art, in which it may be said to denote the poetical department or aspect of things in general, in contradistinction to the scientific. In the text, the word is used in its older, and I hope, not yet obsolete sense. 288 Professor Bain and others call the selection from the truths of science made for the purposes of an art, a Practical Science, and confine the name Art to the actual rules. 289 The word Teleology is also, but inconveniently and improperly, employed by some writers as a name for the attempt to explain the phenomena of the universe from final causes. 290 For an express discussion and vindication of this principle, see the little volume entitled “Utilitarianism.”
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.