374
PARTISAN REVIEW
the difficulty, the greater the stimulus." Or, again, we meet the de–
cisive pronouncement: "The historical link between sixteenth-century
Calvinism and
h~entieth-century
Communism is nineteenth-century
Liberalism."
All is out of context. Restore the context and the points are
irretrievably lost. We may ask, was the defeat of the Dutch and
French empires by the English colonies in the eighteenth century, or
of the South by the North in the Civil War, connected with the hard
ground on which the New Englanders settled, or with such factors
as the development of sea power and the growth of industrialism? To
establish a link between the doctrine of election, the idea of progress,
and historical materialism through the elements of determinism in
each is to stress an incidental similarity above the essential differences.
Calvinism played no part in the formulation of the idea of progress
by such men as Turgot, Condorcet, Godwin, nor did these influence
Marx and Engels in any but' the most negative way. In view of the
deterministic elements in the thinking of such people as Hegel and
Treitschke, we could as well substitute Conservatism for Liberalism
in Toynbee's dictum.
Throughout phantasmagoria is the fundamental method of
proof. Often the argument descends into a repetition of inconclusive
examples, inconclusive because other examples could as well be cited
to prove the opposite.
If
Virginia .and South Carolina sho,w how the
idolization of a once glorious past stood in the way of industrializa–
tion and progress after the Civil War, what of Georgia and Alabama
where the same idolization did not stand in the way?
If
pressure
from the Ottoman Turks was the stimulus to which the greatness of
the Austrian empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was
the response, why did not Romanov Russians produce the same
response to the identical stimulus in the nineteenth century? Archaism
is one of the alternative ways of life open to souls born into a socially
disintegrating world; futurism is the other. But Toynbee's periods
of growth also show signs of archaism and futurism, the fifteenth
century, for instance, in the revival of Greek and in the work of
Leonardo.
Elsewhere a succession of analogies supports the exposition.
Societies are sleepers at the foot of a cliff. Awakened they are civiliza–
tions and commence the climb to their respective eminences, a figure
reduced to its graphic minimum in a recent cover of
Time.
The same
figure can have a meaning other than Toynbee's; the men in the
picture may really be struggling to hold on while they slip inexorably
