A CITY OF GOD
51
behind its own bordeJ , as its spiritual leaders withdraw from life to
undergo the ordeal of scl;'mitting the conscious to the
unconscious. ~
This is the critical moment according to Toynbee (as one must agree
if
one has granted him the validity of the mystic experience at all),
for all depends upon the return to the new life for the purpose of
meeting the adversary. he Indians, says Toynbee, once ailed in the
person of the Buddha, who dissolved himself in Nirvana The Greeks
failed in the person of Plato, who withdrew but did not return to the
.........--
world. The Rornjans failed in the person of Marcus Aurelius, who lost
himself in the mystic City of Zeus. These men were annihilated in
the ;mystic
experience~dismembered
like the Greek god of the
tragedies in his
sparagmos;
the Christian Supermen of history, on the
1 ./
other hand, have returned from death transfigured, and have led so- '
.
'
Ciety toward God.
Toynbee's theory of the growth of civilizations is clearly based
on two fallacies. One is the notion that you have explained movement
by asserting that there is an
elan
which makes things move. The other
is
the belief in mutation':>.* The evolution from matter to Sub-man to
Man
to Superman to God is accomplished, Toynbee holds, by a
series of decisive mutations: this is "our present insight into the in–
wardness of natural phenomena" (Vol. III, p. 192). One is therefore
mystified to learn (Vol. VI, p. 169) that "the principle of continuity
is
of the essence of the movement of growth in whatever terriiSWemay
try to describe or define it." This
i:;
plainly a contradiction, the result
of thinking sometimes as a na uralist and sometimes as a super-
. naturalist. The full-time naturalist will agree with
him
on the general
principle of evolutionary continuity. He will not agree that our present
insight into nature discloses any mutations decisive or clear enough to
support a general theory of biology, let alone history. The effect of this
part-time naturalism is that Toynbee has really written two histories
1
in one book, incompatible and largely irrelevant to each other.
*
"In the last twenty-five years ... many new facts about evolution and
heredity have been discovered, and the balance has now swung over heavily and,
I think, permanently, in favour of Darwinism. Chief among these new facts is
the discovery that most mutations are not large but very small steps of change. . ..
In certain respects, indeed, modern evolutionary theory is more Darwinian than
Darwin was himself." Julian Huxley in the
Virginia Quarterly Review,
Winter, ./
1943.
