Henry Thomas Buckle (24 November 1821 – 29 May 1862)[1] was an English historian, the author of an unfinished History of Civilization and a strong amateur chess player.

[4][5][6] As a boy, Buckle's "delicate health" rendered him unsuited for the usual formal education or games of middle-class youth.

[5] In July 1840, Buckle, his mother, and his sister Mary spent almost a year in Europe, with "extended stays in Germany, Italy, and France.

His inheritance "enabled him to live comfortably", but he spent money prudently with two exceptions: fine cigars and his collection of 22,000 books.

[5] The pornographic publisher John Camden Hotten claimed that his series of flagellation reprints The Library Illustrative of Social Progress had been taken from Buckle's collection, but that was untrue, as reported by Henry Spencer Ashbee.

Shortly afterward, under the influence of this "crushing and desolating affliction", he added an argument for immortality to a review he was writing of John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty.

[6] Buckle's argument was not based on theologians "with their books, their dogmas, their traditions, their rituals, their records, and their other perishable contrivances".

But when "the enemy [death]" approaches, "when the very signs of life are mute ... and there lies before us nought save the shell and husk of what we loved too well, then truly, if we believed the separation were final ... the best of us would succumb, but for the deep conviction that all is not really over."

Thus, Buckle concludeD, "it is, then, to that sense of immortality with which the affections inspire us, that I would appeal for the best proof of the reality of a future life".

Attested by Charles Stewart (of Achara, Appin, Argyllshire), a Scottish nobleman, in his 1901 autobiography, Buckle notes, "Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence ; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest, by their preference for the discussion of ideas".

It is a gigantic unfinished introduction of which the plan was firstly to state the general principles of the author's method and the general laws that govern the course of human progress and secondly to exemplify these principles and laws through the histories of certain nations characterized by prominent and peculiar features: Spain, Scotland, the United States and Germany.

The completed work was to have extended to 14 volumes; its chief ideas are:[6] The North American Review characterized Buckle as a "self-styled historian of civilization".

The review concluded, "notwithstanding these imperfections, we still regard the History of Civilization as perhaps the most important contribution to modern historical science....

It is easy for one to make a great many very superficial objections to Mr. Buckle's mode of treating history..., but the more one comes up with the grandeur of his method, the less disposition there will be to make such objections.... His influence on the thought of the present age cannot but be enormous; and if he gives us no more than we already have in the two volumes of the magnum opus, he will still be classed among the fathers and founders of the Science of History".

[15] A review of Buckle's newly published Essays appeared in the direct predecessor of the Portland Press Herald on Saturday, 27 December 1862.

The editors wrote of Buckle: "a solitary unremitting student, with no encouragement save from the home circle, and no opportunity of measuring himself with rivals, he naturally, with all his wealth of learning, command of language, and vigor of thinking, fell into those pitfalls of rashness and inaccuracy which lie in wait for the recluse".

[16] The paranoid narrator of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground discusses Buckle's theories: "Why, to maintain this theory of the regeneration of mankind by means of the pursuit of his own is to my mind almost the same thing... as to affirm, for instance, following Buckle, that through civilisation mankind becomes softer, and consequently less bloodthirsty and less fitted for warfare.

Nevertheless, "many of his ideas... have been more precisely elaborated by later writers on sociology and history" and his work was immensely valuable in provoking further research and speculation".