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PARTISAN REVIEW
ences to imaginative and intuitive expressions in poetry and myth.
There is a show of intellectual support from the conception, made
up of borrowings from Henri Bergson and Jan Christian Smuts,
of an inner creative source of the heroic response to challenge. But
that philosophic basis is ambiguous and contradictory. For the total
systems of these men are consistent neither with each other nor with
Toynbee's plan of history.
We .are thus never given an explanation of the nature of the link
between the inner
elan
and the external environment; its existence
is simply affirmed. The external environment alone does not call forth
the response. Nor does the response emerge without the challenge.
But is the coincidence accidental or contingent? Are there challenges
to which there may be no response, and
elans
which may never come
to fruition?
These problems are not troublesome to T.oynbee; he acknowledges
that such contradictions cannot
be
resolved, and places his confi–
dence in naked intuition.
A Study of History
makes no attempt to
establish a synthesis or to supply a foundation of its own. Constantly
it edges up to metaphysical problems without ever explicitly confront–
ing them, and we are continually abandoned on the verge of assump–
tions that .are never revealed.
We cannot observe the operations of intuition. But we can criti–
cize its results.
If
the nature of the heroes and of their heroic responses
is still befogged, the nature of their tasks is clear-and on reconsidera–
tion, enlightening. The "rare and superhuman souls" who lead fight
a two-handed enemy. They must struggle both against the physical
environment and against the pressure of the treacherous mass, which
lacks capacity for understanding and must be compelled by charm
or force to follow.
Consideration of that task in our own civilization arouses in
Toynbee a deep sense of uneasiness which seeps through in unex–
pected passages, as in the ill-tempered defense of British imperialism,
in the irritation with Hindus and Zionists, in the unusual meanings
given proletariat and intelligentsia, in the general distrust of intel–
lectual processes. In the six volumes, there is not a good word said
for democracy, perhaps an unconscious omission; but democracy is
assigned the responsibility for the failures of modem education ·and
the horrors of modem war. The sense of shock that comes from con–
templation of the cinema where "people of .all classes" take "an equal
pleasure in films designed to cater for the taste of the proletarian
majority" is only matched by the trauma which comes from observ-
