BOOKS OF THE DAY
I, Lessons from History ?
Civilisation on Trial. By Arnold J. Toynbee. (Oxford University Press.
PiOnssoit TOYNBEE'S volume of essays (thirteen in all) is mostly. based upon lectures and addresses delivered in 1947; only one—and that has been revised and brought into line with the rest—goes back as, far as 1926, and only two others have a -date that is earlier than 1St year. The book has a sort of severe and searing contemporaneity ; it presents to the reader, with a relentless honesty, a picture of' things as they are seen by the author at this dark and sombre hour. To read it is a discipline in courage of the mind ; it is also to admire, and to admire profoundly, the strenuous power of the author's own spirit. Setting nothing down in malice, and extenu- ating nothing, he leaves, without any preaching, a solemn lesson deeply impressed on the thought of the' reader : to face the facts, to think them out, and to act like a man by the light one has found.
.There is something which is deeply moving, and yet at the same time terrifying, in Professor Toynbees wide and Olympian - view of our human history. He sees great sweeping circles of the ' riSe and fall of civilisations • he is cosmic in his scope ; one has the feleling of a great searchlight—kind but somehow remote—wheeling ii long shafts round the ages, and turning its white beam steadily o4 men's doings. One reader, at any rate, is made to feel, -a little
dly, what an old " parochialist " he himself is in comparison. But
rhaps " parochialist " is the wrong word ; "nationalist," in the better sense of that word (the sense of a believer in national character attd the value of national tradition), would perhaps be more just.' To Professor Toynbee, on the whole (but not always or altogether), nations are as dust in the balance. He speaks of "the Western ideological disease of nationalism "—and it is true that nationalism. can be a disease ; he speaks of nationalism as "a formula which brine the elemental forces of industrialism and democracy into a merely, temporary and unstable eqnilibrium " ;' he speaks of it, in another phrase, as "an old bottle burst beyond repair." He prefers to think of "civilisations," (but can there be a civilisation, in any spiritual sense, which is not that of a. nation ?) •' and he moves towards the ideal of one ecumenical civilisation. Not that he sees it in the near future. Today he sees two colossi ; he sees the urgent problem, for us who are West Europeans, as a problem of entering some harbour of safety by steering between the two. The solution to that problem—the via media for the steersman—may be, he suggests, the discovery of a compromise between an economy of unrestricted free enterprise and the economy of Socialism ; and if we in Britain can find that solution ourselves, we may, he feels have something to give to the welfare of the world as a whole and the ecumenical civilisation of the future.
Professor Toynbee has an unparalleled sweep of historical knowledge. The history of Islam, the history of China, and the history of Central Asia, are at his command, as well as the history 12s. 6d.)
of Greece and Rome and of modern Europe ; and he ranges through all the centuries as well as over all the four quarters of the globe. This gives him that "synoptic view of history as a whole" for which he pleads in the essay Civilisation on Trial, which gives its title to the whole of his book. Such a synoptic view of all history has its nobility ; but it has also its perils. For one thing it leads to an abundance of historical parallels (as that between the present condition of West Europe and the condition of the Greek city- states of antiquity or of the Italian city-states of the later Middle Ages) which are often suggestive, but sometimes. misleading. There are differences to be remembered as well as analogies. . .. For another thing, the synoptic view of all history leads to the enunciation of general historic laws governipg the fate of civilisations, which invite and deserve reflection, but which reflection may lead us to doubt. There may be room for universals in history ; there is certainly room for particulars, and for "condescension upon par- ticulars.' The one thing certain in history is the infinite individuality of historic facts. One may seek to weave a pattern from this obstinate individuality ; indeed the more philosophic one is—and Professor Toynbee has the philosophic temperament—the more one tries "to think things together." But the things of history, the histork facts, will persist in being recalcitrantly peculiar and particular.
Is there more hope for the future if one sees history unphilo- sophically—as a matter of individual personalities, particular con- tingencies, a varied and multitudinous field of infinite variety ? It is hard to answer the question. But there may be more hope for us, and even more wisdom, if we draw from history the lesson' that in each given age, we are moving into a future which will be new and unpredictable, and in which we have to guide ourselves by tentative experiment to suit the conditions we find--conditions about which we only know that they will be peculiar, Varticular, individual and, in a word, sui genesis. We may, like Kubla in Coleridge's poem, hear from far "ancestral voices prophesying " ; but the voices can tell us only the temper in which we must act, and the ethic which we must obey, if we are to meet worthily situations and conjunctures of events which cannot themselves be prophesied. The one lesson of the past which we can safely learn is to be worthy of the best that was in it, and to leave, as we disappear and ourselves become part of the past, the best we can to those who succeed us. For the rest—whether there are still to be nations, or one world-civilisation; whether London and Paris and Rome and New York are still centre-points of human affairs, or the Centre- point of a unified world is near_ Babylon or in Transoxania—history can tell us nothing ; and each generation must explore for itself
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