PARTISAN REVIEW
dogmas in terms of which he attempts to decipher the meaning of human
history. Because he has widened the range of his historical inquiries he
deludes himself into believing that his approach is more empirical than
that of Spengler. It is only more Christian.
Toynbee is writing history fundamentally as a poet and moralist
and not as a scientific historian. When he writes illuminatingly about
the past, as he often does, it is for the same reason that we find Dante
and Santayana suggestive in their historical judgments. The sense of
significance which the reader finds in
A Study of History
arises from
Toynbee's genuine psychological and moral insights which are completely
independent of his evangelism. For example, the whole pattern of chal–
lenge-response and ever-differentiated response to fresh challenges which
Toynbee presents as the key to the growth of civilizations is a partial
psychological
truth which enables us to distinguish between individuals
who can cope with a changing environment and those who cannot. Ap–
plied to cultures it is a convenient metaphor that conveys an edifying
moral truth and enhances our awareness of what we already know, viz.,
that the successful life is a continuous succession of problems met and
solved. Unless we can define what constitutes a successful response,
unless we can say in advance what kind of unsuccessful response to
what kind of problem spells disaster for a culture, unless we can formu–
late a hypothesis concerning the determinate conditions under which
a creative response will or will not be made, we have hardly made a
beginning towards a scientific study of the rise, growth, and decline of
cultures. It may be that we do not know enough to speak confidently
about laws that hold for cultures as a whole. But we do not know more
when we resort to myths or to capricious intrusions of the creative
spirit to account for what at the moment we cannot explain.
One might start with quite another psychological or biological in–
sight, and with Toynbee's erudition one could compose, out of selected
historical materials, an entirely different interpretation of cultural de–
velopment and decline. For example, Charles Peirce says somewhere
that all development takes place through the limitation of original pos–
sibilities. Goethe's remark that the secret of all great achievement is
limitation and Veblen's observations about the frustrations of trained
incapacity by overspecialization are corollaries. With Toynbee's imagina–
tive and dramatic flair one could find myriads of historical illustrations
of these principles. Our own problems could be presented in a way
to disclose the operation of these "laws." We could "prove" that the
disastrous consequences of over-reaching power always result from an
attempt to realize incompatible possibilities. Our whole account could
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