Toynbee is not the first historian to introduce the notion of “progress” in his work, and the fallacy of this procedure has been well demonstrated by Collingwood.[20] Of his arguments we can quote only two passages. He maintains that a historian comparing two historical periods or ways of life must be able to “understand (them) historically, that is with enough sympathy and insight to reconstruct their experience for himself.” But that means that he has already accepted them as things to be judged by their own standards. Each is for the historian “a form of life having its own problems, to be judged by its success in solving those problems and no others. Nor is he assuming that the two different ways of life were attempts to do one and the same thing and asking whether the second did it better than the first. Bach was not trying to write like Beethoven and failing; Athens was not a relatively unsuccessful attempt to produce Rome.”
Collingwood then indicates the exceptional (and really purely academic) case in which one may be entitled to speak of progress,[21] and in doing so touches upon a subject with which modern man is particularly concerned:
Can we speak of progress in happiness or comfort or satisfaction? Obviously not.... The problem of being comfortable in a medieval cottage is so different from the problem of being comfortable in a modern slum that there is no comparing them; the happiness of a peasant is not contained in the happiness of a millionaire.
Toynbee, though he is less precise than Collingwood, does formulate what he means by progress. He equates it with growth, and “growth is progress towards self-determination.”[22] But Toynbee, who is a believing Christian, surely knows that self-determination may not be a matter of gradual advance at all, but rather a flash-like illumination in which one’s true nature stands revealed. As a rule, the sequel to this experience is a life-long struggle for a realization of the vision. Why could not this type of self-determination also, like the slow and gradual realization, have an analogy in the life of civilizations? Flinders Petrie and others have maintained that every significant trait of Egyptian culture had been evolved before the end of the Third Dynasty. We find once more that Toynbee has uncritically proclaimed the universal validity of one of several possible sequences. And if he describes “the consummation of human history” as “accomplishing the transformation of Sub-Man through Man into Super-Man”[23] and calls this “the goal towards which ‘the whole creation groaneth and travaileth’ (Romans viii, 22),”[24] we may respect his faith but can hardly accept it as the argument of an “empirical student of history.”[25]
It is, in fact, odd that Toynbee, who opens his work with an excellent statement of the relativity of historical thought, who complains that “a local and temporary standpoint has given our historians a false perspective,” remains himself so completely under the spell of a nineteenth-century western outlook. His evolutionary bias, his empiricism, and his treatment of civilizations as “specimens of a species” are all of a piece. He sometimes equals Spengler in myth-making, treating his equation of civilizations and living beings as a reality, and appealing to biological opinion to uphold a historical conclusion.[26] His use of “species” and “genus” obscures the fundamental fact that science can study individuals as members of a species only by ignoring their individual characteristics. The historian, following this course, would defeat the very purpose of his work.
In fact, Toynbee’s vaunted empiricism is an attempt to transpose the method of the natural sciences, where experiment is essential and experience is reduced to figures, to history, where experiment is impossible and experience subjective. Toynbee’s “experience” (a word which, in the case of a historian, may stand for intimate acquaintance with historical data) is confined to classical antiquity and its western descendant. It is an odd fact that he should have supposed this limited field capable of supplying the conceptual apparatus with which every historical phenomenon could be comprehended, and that he should have done this, not unconsciously, but knowingly, although unaware of the enormity of his assumption. For anyone moving outside western tradition should soon discover the truth that the values found in different civilizations are incommensurate. And so we find Toynbee, like Spengler, doing violence to the evidence and forcing each civilization into a preconceived system of categories. In his case the system is not, like Spengler’s, an imaginative construction; but it is derived from the crucial period in western history when the Roman Empire disintegrated. His generalization of particular circumstances results not in historical errors but in irrelevancies. It would be a tedious and laborious task to demonstrate this to the full; but let us take two characteristic quotations referring to Egypt.
Toynbee expects to find in every civilization an analogy of the early Christian Church in the Roman Empire, and thus postulates for Egypt an “Osireian Church” as a “universal church created by an internal proletariat.”[27] Now, a “church” as an organized body of believers was not known in Egypt at any time (nor in Mesopotamia, for that matter). The worship of Osiris, always a main concern of the king, spread through all classes of the population, but merely as one among many devotions which filled the life of every Egyptian; the god was never honoured by one group more than by another. And, in fact, no section of the population of Egypt can be called a proletariat if this word is to remain applicable to imperial Rome or to modern times. If, elsewhere,[28] Toynbee describes the expulsion of the Hyksos invaders from Egypt as due to a “union sacrée between the dominant minority of the Egyptiac society and its internal proletariat against the external proletariat as represented by the Hyksos” one can only say that the words, severally and in conjunction, do not apply. But he continues:
for it was this reconciliation at the eleventh hour that prolonged the existence of the Egyptiac society—in a petrified state of life-in-death—for two thousand years beyond the date when the progress of disintegration would otherwise have reached its natural term in dissolution. And this life-in-death was not merely an unprofitable burden to the moribund Egyptiac society itself; it was also a fatal blight upon the growth of the living Osireian church ... for this union sacrée ... took the form of an amalgamation of the living worship of Osiris with the dead worship of the official Egyptiac pantheon.
Reading this, one would not suspect that the five centuries following the expulsion of the Hyksos are the most brilliant epoch of Egyptian history. One would also not assume that after about one thousand years of this “life-in-death,” religious texts glorifying Amon-Re were written which in profundity of thought and literary splendour belong to the greatest in Egyptian literature, and are its nearest approach to the majestic monotheism of the Old Testament.[29] Surely an “empirical” approach would have started from the fact that Egyptian civilization did actually retain its vitality over an unusually long period. Toynbee, however, declares that the Egyptian achievements in the second and first millennia B.C. are but illusions, for the scheme to which he is committed (although it is alien, and hence irrelevant, to Egyptian history) requires a “time of troubles” before the Middle Kingdom[30] which must be followed by a “universal church” with its two types of proletariat. Thus the confessed “empiricist” adheres to a preconceived system and disposes of the facts by proclaiming the Hyksos period “a date when the process of disintegration would otherwise have reached its natural term in dissolution.” (The italics are mine.)
The scheme which we have criticized in its application to Egypt is intended to render account of the dynamics of civilizations in their last phases. For the early phases, the classical world cannot supply ready-made notions. Here Toynbee introduces a set of formulas which may be summarized in his own words: