Buckle, HENRY THOMAS, was born at Lee, in Kent, 24th November 1821, the son of a London merchant, a Tory and staunch churchman. A sickly child, he was for a very short time at an academy in Kentish-Town; no other school and no university claims credit for his education, which yet was liberal in the highest degree. At the age of eighteen he found himself master of £1500 a year, and by 1850 he knew eighteen foreign languages, and had amassed a library of 22,000 volumes, chosen mostly to help him in a magnum opus, which gradually took shape as The History of Civilisation in England. The first volume appeared in 1857, the second in 1861; but his health had been meantime shattered by the loss of an idolised mother; and on 29th May 1862, after six months' wandering in Egypt and Palestine, he died of typhoid fever at Damaseus. For more than twenty years he had been reckoned one of the first chess-players in the world.
Buckle's plan involved, before tracing the particular history of English civilisation, a general consideration of the progress of those countries, England, France, Germany, Scotland, Spain, and America, in which the elements of modern civilisation are originally found. The two volumes published are occupied with this preliminary examination, which they do not even complete. His objects, however, are clear. They are (1) to discover what is the essential spirit of a nation's history apart from particular men and events, and (2) to trace out the causes of the progress which has been made in England and France. Under the first head he endeavours to show that the spirit or character of a people is determined by material environments, such as soil, climate, food, aspects of nature, and the like; under the second head occurs the theory—whose vigorous application startled and offended many readers—that the progress of society depends upon scepticism; that the retarding force is credulity; and that the excessive 'protection' exercised by governments, the nobility, the church, &c. over the 'people,' has dwarfed and held back the spirit of freedom and civilisation. These and other positions are defended by Buckle with great ingenuity and lucidity of argument and expression, and have been admitted, even by his opponents, to contain much truth. He is accused—not unjustly—of being often one-sided, and of drawing sweeping deductions from an imperfect survey of facts.
See Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works, ed. by Miss Taylor (1872; new ed. by Grant Allen, 1880); the Life by A. H. Huth (2 vols. 1880); and J. M. Robertson, Buckle and his Critics (1895).