Note 32 — I. THE STUDY OF ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS

Op. cit., III, 248-377. In the history of individuals Toynbee applies it not only to the Buddha or to saints who of their own free will withdrew from society in order to clarify their mission and the message which they were to preach, but also to men like Thucydides, Dante, and Macchiavelli, who were exiled, and bitterly lamented their banishment even though it did not destroy their powers to create. They worked in a solitude not of their choosing and never returned at all, however effective their work may have proved to be in the course of time. Toynbee also applies the formula of “Withdrawal-and-Return” to social groups in a manner which fails to explain anything, as, for instance, when he states that the Nonconformists, after the Restoration, reacted on persecutions by “withdrawing into the realm of private business in order to return omnipotent, a century and a half later, as the authors of the Industrial Revolution” (Ibid., 334). Thus, the interplay of dire necessity and circumstances of every description is reduced to a formula which confuses the issue by a theological implication (withdraw in order to) which in more than one place (e.g. in the image of the climbers and the mountainside) turns Toynbee’s account of the facts into mythology. I am purposely avoiding a discussion of Toynbee’s examples taken from the Near East or Crete, since I should then have to correct his facts and should become a “critic aiming instruments at bits and pieces” (Horizon, XV [London, January 1947], 50.) Readers interested in a detailed criticism by an authority on European history (who likewise considers principles rather than isolated errors) are referred to the essay of Professor P. Geyl in Journal of the History of Ideas, IX (New York, 1948), 93-124.