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Review' M. St. A. Woodside Friedrich von Schlegel is reported to have said, "Every man finds in the ancients what he needs or wants, and above all, himself." This is presumably an exaggerated way of stating that it is impossible to write purely objective history; that the student of the past in greater or less measure inevitably imposes upon it something of himself and something of the age in which he lives. The past is dead. It survives only in "historical evidence"-in documents, memoirs, objects in museums and art galleries, and other dumb and scrappy material, and it becomes a living process or an exciting panorama only when the historian infuses into it the breath of life. But the most the historian can do is to give his reader an account of his own experience in considering the evidence, and consequently the only life which the historian can lend to the evidence is his own life, conditioned as it must be by the age and the society in which he lives. If there is agreement among historians, it must b~ due to the fact that all of them begin with the same evidence and perhaps, in some measure, to whatever truth there is in the remark of Sir Max Beerbohm that "History doesn't repeat itself; historians merely repeat one another"; if there is disagreement, it is due (provided that evidence bas not been overlooked and that the historians are reasonably competent) to the fact that history must be studied and written by individuals. In many cases where two competent historians disagree, the experience of one with the evidence is merely different from that of the other; the conclusions of both, as competent historians, may be valid. Toynbee has with his monumental Study oj History evoked criticism, friendly or hostile, from a majority of professional historians partly because of his methods, partly because of his interpretations both of specific short passages of history and of the whole. The critics have been stimulating to serious readers of Toynbee's Study and no doubt they have been stimulating to Toynbee himself. At any rate he has taken the opportunity represented by the section of volume IX entitled "Law and Freedom in History" to attempt to answer some of the criticism. Nevertheless, if the first paragraph of this review has any cogency, Toynbee cannot be convicted of being wrong unless he can be convicted of overlooking evidence or making dishonest use of it. The fact that his interpretations and conclusions differ from those of other competent scholars can prove nothing except that the doctors disagree. It is in the highly important matter of familiarity with "historical evi- *Arnold Toynbec, A Study of History, vots. VII, VIlI, IX, X. London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1954. Pp. xxxii, 772; x, 732; viii, 759; viii, 442. $32.00 per set. 104 REVIEW 105 dence"-a knowledge of which is absolutely indispensable to the would-be historian-that Toynbee is most vulnerable. His method, by now so familiar as to require no detailed description, is to analyse human history ioto twenty-one civilizations, plus some doubtful or imperfect examples of the species, to regard them as "philosophically contemporary," and by comparing them to attempt to induce social "laws" (the inverted commas are Toynbee's) applicable to civilizations, and in particular to the births, growths, breakdowns, and disintegrations of civilizations. Toynbee thus essays not to write a chronological narrative but to understand and to analyse. and finally to make a synthesis of. the whole of human history since the times when in different areas of the world different societies ceased to be "primitive" and became "civilized." He has taken the world and approximately six millennia of time for his parish. It would be quite obvious even without the bibliographies in the Study's foot-notes that Toynbee as an individual hUman being could not possibly be familiar with all the original «historical evidence." While he is thoroughly at home with the evidence for some areas of history (the Hellenic civilization is the best but not the only example). he is cut off by barriers of language and of lack of time from the evidence for...

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