It is evident that, up to a period subsequent to the publication of his first volume, the writer of the 'History of Civilization' entertained the fullest confidence in the ability of the Inductive Method to cope with the ultimate problems of the Universe, and had high expectations of being able, through its instrumentality, to reduce the whole body of our Knowledge to a systematic whole, and to establish a Science of Sciences which should be a Criterion of Truth, and the crowning intellectual achievement of the ages. Whether Mr. Buckle fully comprehended the real nature of the Science toward which he was aiming; whether he entirely appreciated the radical and important change which its discovery would necessarily introduce into our Methods of Investigation;--whether he saw that it would be the inauguration of a true Deductive Mode of reasoning, which would enable us to advance with incredible rapidity and certainty into the arcana of those departments which he was then obliged to explore with the most tedious research, the most plodding patience, and the most destructive intellectual tension, in order to accumulate a limited array of Facts, is somewhat doubtful.
The significant sentence which occurs in the second volume of his work, closely following the announcement of his disappointment at being unable to achieve all that he had expected and promised, and which states that 'in a complete scheme of our knowledge, and when all our resources are fully developed and marshalled into order, as they must eventually be, the two methods [the Inductive and the Deductive] will be, not hostile, but supplementary, and will be combined into a single system,' seems to indicate that at some period prior to the publication of the second volume, and subsequent to the issue of the first, the insufficient nature of the Inductive Method as a Scientific guide broke upon him, and some conception of the nature of a Mode of Reasoning which should combine the two Processes in just relations, began to dawn into his mind. That he obtained anything more than a faint glimpse of the true Method, is not likely. Had he done so, he would certainly have made some statement of the great results which would follow its inauguration, even if he could have refrained from bestowing one of his glowing and enraptured paragraphs upon the fairest and most entrancing vision of future achievement which the devotee of intellectual investigation will ever witness.