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THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND HISTORICAL LEARNING IN a previous article in this Journal I treated problems of the stability, decline and fall of' civilizations in the light of the philosophy of history. Following Toynbee's morphology of civilizations I showed the characteristic way in which these higher societies have declined (in the form of cycles) . Higher cultures have broken down and begun to decline because the goodness of the supra-national civilization has been lost sight of by its member states. The typical course of civilizations ' histories shows a serial of goods and ideals which have been pursued, and suggests that a philosophy of culture should take into account all the true goods and ideals. The philosophy of history, therefore, in some way ought to posit the simultaneous presence of all the perfections that are proper to civilizations and which have occurred in the course of their histories. At the same time, virtues and vices have a cultural significance which ought to be elaborated in the philosophy of history. Hence the philosophy is a cultural ethics and, in my view, a Christian philosophy/ 1 " The Philosophy of History and the Stability of Civilizations" (THE THOMIST, XX, April 1957, 158-190). The philosophy of history, I think, is the fourth part of a quadrumvirate of ethical disciplines: li!fonastica (or personal ethics), Oeconomica (or domestic ethics), Politica (or political ethics) and Ilistorica (or cultural ethics). I use civilization and culture as synonymous, meaning not only culture in the ordinary sense of the word but especially a supra-national society and its values; viz., a higher civilization such as the Egyptian or Western Civilization. As to ethics, let me give an example of a cultural vice. The eighteenth century Western Civilization was notably an age of irony, an era of literary levity, dissatisfaction and satire. Involved here is the vice called t

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