"There are many points upon which Comte and Buckle are one; perhaps they are even more than those in which they differ: but while the former are mostly subsidiary, the latter are mostly fundamental. Comtes laws of civilization are evolved as a necessary deduction... Buckle... proves the predictability of human actions by statistics. ...Buckle ...discovers the laws of civilization first inductively, and then ...reverses the process and proves them deductively. ...Every step Buckle takes is strictly reasoned, and his proof is more positive and verified than any Comte chooses ...Buckles work stands on the same basis as any other scientific work, while Comte with all his positive claim ...[has] no inductive complement to his deductive proof."
Henry Thomas Buckle was an English historian, the author of an unfinished History of Civilization and a strong amateur chess player. He is sometimes called "the Father of Scientific History".
"Henry Thomas Buckle expired at on the last day of May in the present year. ...There has passed away from the world one of the heroes, if not one of the martyrs of learning. ...[T]he announcement of his death has cast a shadow upon many who knew him only as an indefatigable wooer of knowledge, a bold explorer in the regions of historical and social science."
"Having gained a prize for mathematics, and being desired by his parents to name his own additional reward, he claimed the privilege of being removed from school, and receiving thenceforth his education at home. ...Mr. Buckle ...was either dissatisfied with his instructors, or resolved to be the sole architect of his own mind. His tutors were dismissed; and he, a boy of fourteen years, set forth without a pilot upon the sea of knowledge."
"In about four years his multifarious studies began to converge towards one focus—the intellectual progress and civilization of mankind. ...[I]ts fulfilment became the object of his life."
"His recluse life entailed upon his writings some serious disadvantages. If from his study he did not rail at human kind, he formed, from his long commerce with books alone, harsh and one-sided opinions of classes, that earlier and more free intermixtures with them would have softened or corrected."
"With many readers the author has doubtless passed for a hard man, dealing with mens actions and thoughts as with so many links in the chain of causation, with the aspects of life as the mere products or phenomena of Fate or Necessity."
"And, notwithstanding a few exceptions, we do undoubtedly find that the most truly eminent men have had not only their affections, but also their intellect, greatly influenced by women. I will go even farther; and I will venture to say that those who have not undergone that influence betray a something incomplete and mutilated. We detect, even in their genius, a certain frigidity of tone; and we look in vain for that burning fire, that gushing and spontaneous nature with which our ideas of genius are indissolubly associated. Therefore, it is, that those who are most anxious that the boundaries of knowledge should be enlarged, ought to be most eager that the influence of women should be increased, in order that every resource of the human mind may be at once and quickly brought into play."