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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
Leipzig, 29 April 1871 The French school, always absorbed in the astronomical preoccupations of its founder, sees in man, who lacks freedom of the will, only a being who is subjected to some sort of external and independent force, one which has the remarkable knack of making man, who is not conscious of this force, yet feel responsible for his actions.
The German school… finds this French interpretation perverse and untenable, for it turns a proposition, that in itself is sound, upside down. One need not deny that if there were such a powerful external law at work, then there would be a regular repetition of crimes, marriages, suicides etc. But it is a mistake to say that existing regularities can be explained only by such external laws. The regularities establish for the careful thinker only the existence of some powerful causes, whether they be external to the agent or internal.
Buckle published the first volume of his History of Civilization in England in 1857. He was 36, a familiar Victorian figure – the shy bachelor, neurasthenic, constantly beset by nervous and gastric disorders, working obsessively, prodigously erudite, filled with a vision of some unspoken grandeur, and, in a brief moment of total success, lionized. His book won instant fame all over Europe. He was dead at 40. A line in Dostoyevsky's St Petersburg notebook, written about 1862: ‘Read and reread Buckle and Moleschott!’ But he was not received in the same way in all parts of Europe.
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