CITY OF GOD
47
sterilizing influence of Industrialism upon historical thought." He
believes that Acton's mind was paralyzed by the division-of-labor
philosophy of historical writing, which has resulted in such disjointed
compendia as the Cambridge Histories. Whether or not he is right "
about Lord Acton (and I don't think he is), Toynbee is certainly
wrong in his belief that the mediocre compendium history written
by specialists is the inevitable result of applying the scientific method
to history. Voltaire's
Essai sur les moeurs
does not imply the Cam–
bridge Histories any more than Sir Isaac Newton implies Henry Ford.
A world history, however, must be composed of the separate
civilizations which the specialists have described. Toynbee rejects the
belief of the Enlightenment that western culture is the single fruit of
all
previous societies. This idea, he says, indicates the overweening
pride of "Homo Occidentalis Mechanicus," who thought of him-)
self as a "Lor4._ of Creation" on whose boundaries lived other kinds
u
of people known
~atives."
There are,
in
fact, at least twenty-one
~
civilizations in the history of the world of camparable merit and
interest. Seven of these societies are still living, and of these ours is
only one.
Toynbee singles civilizations out according to their religions; he
disavows political, economic, environmental and aesthetic criteria,
believing that these always prove superficial. His civilizations are thus
the Egyptiac, Andean, Sinic, Minoan, Sumeric, Mayan, Syriac, lndic,
Hittite, Hellenic, Western, Orthodox Christian
(in
Russia), Orthodox
Christian (main body), Far Eastern (in Korea and Japan), Far
Eastern (main body), lranic, Arabic, Hindu, Mexic, Yucatec and
Babylonic. But to think of societies as discrete units would be, ac-
V
cording to Toynbee, to subscribe either to the fallacy of materialism
or to the crude organic morphology of Spengler. He feels that there ) ./
must be some encompassing medium. And this is where, having
masterfully distinguished his twenty-one societies as "intelligible fields )
of study," Toynbee dissolves his distinctions into a mystic holism. He
loses himself in long, loosely selected quotations from
Gerald~ax:dl/
(The Ascent of Humanity),
General Smuts
(Holism and Evolution)
'--
and Ber on. Bergson is usually the bridge on which he passes from
his
eviden to his cosmic generali tions. Bergson, says Toynbee,
"feels Life and feelc; it as
whole"; Life is a continuum evolving
toward the divine. The twenty-one civilizations
~nited
across
sp~
and time by their creative
elan
and by their striving "upward"
