Our subject is the birth of civilization in the Near East. We shall not,
therefore, consider the question how civilization in the abstract became
possible. I do not think there is an answer to that question; in any
case it is a philosophical rather than a historical one. But it may be
said that the material we are going to discuss has a unique bearing on
it all the same. For the emergence of Egyptian and Mesopotamian
civilization has some claim to being considered as the birth of
civilization in a general sense. It is true that the transition from
primitive to civilized conditions has happened more than once; but the
change has mostly been induced—or at least furthered—by contact with
more advanced foreigners. We know of only three instances where the
event may have been spontaneous: in the ancient Near East, in China, and
in South and Middle America. However, the genesis of the Maya and Inca
civilizations is obscure, and for China we must count with the
possibility—some would say the likelihood—of a stimulus from the West.
But no appeal to foreign influence can explain the emergence of
civilized societies in Egypt and Mesopotamia, since these lands were the
first to rise above a universal level of primitive existence.
In the sequel we shall leave this aspect of our subject to one side: in
other words, though the fact that in the Near East civilization arose
spontaneously, and for the first time imparts a particular weight and
splendour to the events, we are specifically concerned with the events
themselves. And here, at the very outset, a difficulty must be faced.
It seems easy to deal in a general way with civilizations as entities;
at least this is commonly done. Arnold Toynbee, in his _Study of
History_, distinguishes without hesitation twenty-one
civilizations—“specimens of the species,” belonging to the “genus
societies”—by what he believes to be an empirical method. But consider
the problem which arises when we want to study the genesis of any one
civilization in particular! We cannot merely assume that it is an entity
and has a recognizable character of its own; we are bound to make that
character explicit in order that we may decide _when_ and _where_ it
emerged.
This problem is hardly ever envisaged by those who are best acquainted
with the actual remains of antiquity. The archaeologist is either
occupied with disentangling successive phases in his stratified
material; or he constructs from his finds a fairly continuous story of
man’s increasing skill and enterprise. In this context the questions
_when_ and _why_ we are entitled to speak of the existence of Egyptian
or Sumerian (_i.e._ early Mesopotamian) civilization seem of secondary
importance. On the other hand, the philologist does not encounter the
question at all. For him, Sumerian or Egyptian civilization exists from
the moment when texts were written in these languages.
Our problem is pre-eminently a historical one, and it has, accordingly,
two aspects: that of _identity_ and that of _change_. What constitutes
the individuality of a civilization, its recognizable character, its
identity which is maintained throughout the successive stages of its
existence? What, on the other hand, are the changes differentiating one
stage from the next? We are not, of course, looking for a formula; the
character of a civilization is far too elusive to be reduced to a
catchword. We recognize it in a certain coherence among its various
manifestations, a certain consistency in its orientation, a certain
cultural “style” which shapes its political and its judicial
institutions, its art as well as its literature, its religion as well as
its morals. I propose to call this elusive identity of a civilization
its “form.” It is this “form” which is never destroyed although it
changes in the course of time. And it changes partly as a result of
inherent factors—development—partly as a result of external
forces—historical incidents. I propose to call the total of these
changes the “dynamics” of a civilization.
The interplay of form and dynamics constitutes the history of a
civilization and raises the question—which lies outside our present
inquiry—to what extent the form of a civilization may determine its
destiny.
For the moment, the distinction of form and dynamics enables us to bring
some clarity into the problems connected with our present subject, the
birth of Near Eastern civilization. Under the aspect of “form” we may
ask: what actually does appear when this civilization comes into being?
Is its form established piecemeal? If so, whence comes the coherence
which characterizes it throughout its historical existence? Under the
aspect of “dynamics” we may ask: is the emergence of this civilization a
gradual process? Are earlier elements transmuted or combined by degrees,
or is the peculiar coherence of a mature civilization the outcome of a
sudden and intense change, a crisis in which its form—undeveloped but
potentially a whole—crystallizes out, or rather, is born? The title of
this book indicates the answer which I think the evidence compels us to
accept as correct. But, before we consider the evidence, it will be
profitable to discuss certain current opinions. For if it is true—as we
have said before—that those best acquainted with the ancient Near East
have rarely found occasion to consider our problem, it is equally true,
of course, that we are not the first to discuss it.
Curiously enough, the two men who have devoted their life’s work to the
problem of the genesis of civilization have done so under a compelling
awareness of its decline. Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee both wrote
under the shadow of an impending world war; and their work is, to some
extent, warped by their preoccupation with decay. Oswald Spengler’s
_Decline of the West_ was first published in 1917 and bears the
subtitle, _Outline of a Morphology of World History_.[2] This indicates
that the aspect of form (as we have called it) is fully considered in
his work. In this resides, as a matter of fact, the element of lasting
worth of his sensational, arrogant, and pompous volumes. They were
written as a reaction against the prevalent view of history which was
prejudiced in two respects: it considered world history exclusively from
the western standpoint; and it presumed, with evolutionary optimism,
that history exemplified the progress of humanity. For Spengler the word
“humanity” is merely an empty phrase. The great civilizations are
unconnected. They are self-contained organisms of so individual a nature
that people who belong to one cannot understand the achievements and
modes of thought of another. He maintains that not even in science does
knowledge show accumulations transcending the limits of one
civilization.
It would seem that under such conditions world history is not feasible
at all, and this has, in fact, been maintained by no less a historian
than Ernst Troeltsch.[3] But Spengler thinks otherwise because he
applies biological methods to the study of civilizations. The very word
“morphology,” which figures in his sub-title, usually denotes the study
of form and structure in plants and animals; it warns us to expect
biological categories and these, indeed, abound. For instance, Spengler
maintains that in different civilizations we can find not
_analogues_—features similar as regards function—but only
_homologues_—features similar as regards form. He also maintains that
the life-cycle of each civilization runs through the same phases: youth,
maturity, and senescence. This implies that a comparison of
corresponding phases in different civilizations may be instructive, but
that it is merely confusing to compare phases which do not correspond;
for then one is led to expect, for instance, that an ageing civilization
(like our own) might yet be able to produce great poetry or a live
religion, which are features peculiar to civilizations in their youthful
stage.
The birth of civilization is succinctly described by Spengler in the
following passage:
It comes into flower on the soil of a precisely definable region, to
which it remains linked with a plant-like attachment. A civilization
dies when it has realized the sum total of its potentialities in the
guise of peoples, languages, theologies, arts, states, sciences.[4]
I have omitted certain untranslatable references to an _urseelenhafter
Zustand_ from which civilizations are supposed to emerge and to which
their “souls” return. For the quotation shows clearly that Spengler,
notwithstanding these irrational additions, writes, like Toynbee, under
the spell of the nineteenth century and attempts to interpret history in
the terms of science. Even if we admit that the country in which a
civilization arises influences its form, we must balk at Spengler’s
formulation (repeated elsewhere in his work, _e.g._ I, 29) which
approaches materialistic determinism. By interpreting the harmony
between each civilization and its natural setting in this manner, he
denies a freedom of the human spirit which—to name but one instance—the
achievements of the Greeks in Sicily and southern Italy splendidly
vindicate.
In describing the death of a civilization Spengler is likewise under the
spell of scientific notions. This is not obvious; in fact, Spengler’s
success is largely due to the plausibility of some of his most
imaginative statements. We feel that it makes sense, even that it is
illuminating, to speak of a youthful, or ageing, or dying civilization.
But for Spengler such phrases are not metaphors; and when he speaks (as
in the previous quotation) of a civilization’s dying “when it has
realized the sum total of its potentialities,” he believes that he
refers to a state of affairs as inevitable and as accurately predictable
as the withering of a plant. He actually calls civilizations “living
beings of the highest order,”[5] and he undertakes to state with
precision which phenomena characterize each stage in their life-cycle.
For him, an imperialistic and socialistic order follow a traditional and
hierarchical society; expanding technique and trade follow greatness in
art, music, and literature as certainly as the dispersal of the seeds
follows the maturing of a plant which will never flower again. But to
take the biological metaphor literally, to grant in this manner reality
to an image, is not morphology but mythology; and it is belief, not
knowledge, which induces Spengler to deny the freedom of the spirit and
the unpredictability of human behaviour.
Spengler substitutes the mystery of natural life for the dynamics of
history which he, therefore, fails entirely to explain.[6] But to the
aspect of “form” he has done justice as few before him. Here too,
however, he goes much too far. It is one thing to stress the singularity
of each great epoch of the past as a prerequisite of deeper
understanding, and quite another to declare the discontinuity of
cultural achievements to be absolute. Had the first been Spengler’s
intention, no one who had once comprehended the uniqueness of a
historical situation, a work of art, or an institution, would have
quarrelled with his dictum: “Each civilization has its own possibilities
of expression, which appear, mature and wither, and never recur.”[7]
When he states, furthermore, “I see in world-history the image of a
perennial configuration and transfiguration, a wonderful formation and
dissolution of organic forms. The professional historian, however, sees
in it the image of a tape-worm which tirelessly puts forth period after
period,” there is enough truth in this scathing remark for it to strike
home. It is a negative truth, but it is born of a true perception of the
poverty of our usual view of history as an evolutionary process. This
view encourages us to project the axioms, habits of thought, and norms
of the present day into the past, which, as a result, seems to contain
little that is unfamiliar to us. It is remarkable how rarely historians
of ancient or alien civilizations have guarded themselves against that
danger. In this respect Herodotus was more perspicacious; he realized
that the values of different cultures may be incommensurate when he
frankly epitomized his description of Ancient Egypt in the statement
that its laws and customs were, on the whole, the opposite of those of
the rest of mankind.[8] This peculiar integration of the facts satisfied
a Greek facing Barbarians. We, however, seek understanding. We can be
resigned neither to registering astonishment nor to accepting the
solution which a misconceived regard for objectivity sometimes proposes:
a mere chronicling of the facts. We cannot rest content when we know
that the Egyptians considered their king a god, entombed him in a
pyramid, buried cats and dogs, and mummified their dead. We want to
recover the cultural “form” in which these odd phenomena find their
proper place and meaning. But it is a laborious, and never completed,
task to rediscover the original coherence of a past mode of life from
the surviving remains. Spengler attempts short cuts; overrating the
extent of his truly remarkable erudition, and, for the rest, trusting
recklessly his intuition, he forces the evidence to fit the schemata
which he has conceived. He describes, for instance, the bearer of
Egyptian civilization as follows:
The Egyptian soul—pre-eminently gifted for and inclined towards
history, striving with primeval passion towards the
infinite—experienced past and future as its entire universe, and the
present ... but as a narrow borderland between two measureless
distances. The Egyptian civilization is an embodiment of concern—the
soul’s correlate of distance—concern with the future, manifest in the
choice of granite and basalt as the material for sculpture, in the
engraved documents, in the elaboration of a masterly system of
administration and a net of irrigation works; of necessity a concern
with the past is linked with this concern for the future.[9]
I hold this image of ancient Egypt evoked by Spengler to be totally at
variance with the evidence. I have recently interpreted this evidence
and described how (to take up the points raised by Spengler) the
Egyptians had very little sense of history or of past and future. For
they conceived their world as essentially static and unchanging. It had
gone forth complete from the hands of the Creator. Historical incidents
were, consequently, no more than superficial disturbances of the
established order, or recurring events of never-changing significance.
The past and the future—far from being a matter of concern—were wholly
implicit in the present; and the odd facts enumerated above—the divinity
of animals and kings, the pyramids, mummification—as well as several
other and seemingly unrelated features of Egyptian civilization—its
moral maxims, the forms peculiar to its poetry and prose—can all be
understood as a result of a basic conviction that only the changeless is
truly significant.[10] I do not offer this summary as a formula by means
of which Egyptian civilization becomes comprehensible, for it explains
nothing by itself and does not pretend to replace the detailed and
concrete description of Egyptian life and thought which it summarizes.
Nor can even such a detailed description ever be final or entirely
comprehensive. I do hold that a viewpoint whence many seemingly
unrelated facts are seen to acquire meaning and coherence is likely to
represent a historical reality; at least, I know of no better definition
of historical truth. But each new insight discloses new complexities
which now demand elucidation, while at all times a number of facts are
likely to remain outside any network to be established. However, if our
view is true as far as it goes, then Spengler’s view is baseless.
Spengler’s lack of respect for the phenomena has a twofold cause. It is
due in part to his overweening conceit, in part to his lack of
experience. Like Toynbee, he is truly familiar only with classical
antiquity and its western descendant. His _Urmensch_, his “primordial
man,” is the Greek or the Aryan Indian.[11] He ignores altogether the
work of those who have ventured outside the familiar in order to meet an
alien spirit on its own terms—the anthropologists, or, more precisely,
the ethnologists or cultural anthropologists. These scholars have come
up against behaviour defying every modern norm in their personal contact
with primitive peoples, and in their encounters discovered an approach
to the study of alien cultures which the historian of antiquity would be
wise to make his own. The ethnologist will not take for granted savage
customs and usages which seem comprehensible—even familiar—to him. For
he has observed that cultural traits cannot be studied in isolation
since they are integral parts of a whole—the given civilization—and
derive their meaning from the particular whole in which they occur. Ruth
Benedict, in her lucid _Patterns of Culture_, states the case as
follows:
It is in cultural life as it is in speech: selection is the prime
necessity.... We must imagine a great arc on which are ranged the
possible interests provided either by the human age-cycle or by the
environment or by man’s various activities. A culture that capitalized
even a considerable proportion of these would be as unintelligible as
a language that used all the clicks, all the glottal stops, all the
labials, dentals, sibilants and gutturals from voiceless to voiced,
and from oral to nasal. Its identity as a culture depends upon the
selection of some segments of this arc. Every human society everywhere
has made such a selection in its cultural institutions. Each, from the
point of view of another, ignores fundamentals and exploits
irrelevancies. One culture hardly recognizes monetary values; another
has made them fundamental in every field of behaviour. In one society
technology is unbelievably slighted even in those aspects of life
which seem necessary to ensure survival; in another, equally simple,
technological achievements are complex and fitted with admirable
nicety to the situation. One builds an enormous cultural
superstructure upon adolescence, one upon death, one upon
afterlife.[12]
Hence—and as a warning to those who are partial to utilitarian
explanations: “The importance of an institution in a culture gives no
direct indication of its usefulness or its inevitability,”[13] for
cultural behaviour is integrated and the whole determines the
significance of the parts:
Within each culture there come into being characteristic purposes not
necessarily shared by other types of society. In obedience to these
purposes each people further and further consolidates its experience
... and the most ill-assorted acts become characteristic of its
peculiar goals, often by the most unlikely metamorphoses. The form
that these acts take we can understand only by understanding first the
emotional and intellectual mainsprings of that society.[14]
We have seen that any society selects some segment of the arc of
possible human behaviour, and in so far as it achieves integration its
institutions tend to further the expression of its selected segment
and to inhibit the opposite expressions.[15]
There is, in this last passage, a suggestion of the dynamics of the
formation of a civilization but it is not this aspect but that of “form”
which prevails in the work of Benedict or Malinowski. For modern savages
are relatively stagnant if we discount the disturbances caused by the
white man. Hence the title _Patterns of Culture_.
It is, however, precisely the problem of the dynamics of cultural
change—a problem misconstrued by Spengler and rightly ignored by Ruth
Benedict—which lies at the centre of Arnold Toynbee’s work. The first
three volumes of _A Study of History_ appeared in 1934, a second group
of three in 1939, and a final group is still to be published. But we are
told that the preoccupation from which the work has sprung, goes back as
far as 1911, when Toynbee travelled in Crete and saw the newly
discovered remains of the sea-empire of Minos. Then he chanced on the
ruins of a Venetian villa, remnant of the time when Venice had dominated
the Mediterranean with its galleys. And Toynbee was disconcerted at the
thought that yet another empire that “rules the waves” even in our own
day might follow its predecessors in decline.[16] Now a preoccupation
with decay such as underlies Toynbee’s work need not in itself vitiate
study of the birth of civilization; however, the “change and identity”
of cultural forms must not be handled mechanically but with all the
reverence for the singular which historical material demands. And it is
here rather than in errors of fact (which are inevitable in a work of
this scope) that we find Toynbee’s work defective. We must, moreover,
take exception to his lack of critical precision and to the inadequacy
of his conceptual apparatus.
Toynbee, like Spengler, invests certain images which he uses with a
spurious reality. These ostensible similes pervade the argument with an
implied assurance that they reflect historical situations. When Toynbee
compares civilizations with motor cars on a one-way street,[17] or with
men resting or climbing on a mountainside, he conveys the impression
(which he himself judges correct) that a definite direction, a forward
or upward movement, is discernible in history. But such dynamics are
imputed, not observed. He writes:
Primitive societies, as we know them by direct observation, may be
likened to people lying torpid upon a ledge on a mountainside, with a
precipice below and a precipice above; civilizations may be likened to
companions of these “sleepers of Ephesus” who have just risen to their
feet and have started to climb on up the face of the cliff.[18]
This image (further elaborated in the book, and duly illustrated with a
picture in _Time_ magazine) does a great deal more than tell us that
primitive societies are static and civilizations dynamic. The dominating
feature of the image is the rock cliff with its succession of ledges and
precipices. Where is the historical reality corresponding to this
scenery which exists _independent_ of the sleepers and climbers and
_determines_ their direction? The “one-way street” likewise suggests a
predetermined orientation and limitation of cultural endeavour. Toynbee
believes that there is a cliff to be climbed, a street to be followed.
Yet the truth is—in the terms of his images—that we see figures at rest
or on the move in a cloudy space but know nothing about their relative
position: we do not know which ledge is above or below which other
ledge. Or again: we see motor cars moving, halting, or out of order. But
we do not know whether they move in an alley, or on a four-drive
highway, on an open plain, or within a circle—we do not even know
whether there is an entrance or exit at all.
Toynbee’s images betray an evolutionistic as well as a moral bias which
interferes with the historian’s supreme duty of doing justice to each
civilization on its own terms. Why should we characterize civilizations
which have achieved a deep and lasting harmony (like those of the Zuni
or of certain Polynesians) as “arrested civilizations” where “no energy
is left over for reconnoitring the course of the road ahead, or the face
of the cliff above them, with a view to a further advance”?[19] Where is
this road or this cliff? Why should these chimaeras and a feverish
desire for “advancement” disturb the satisfaction of people who have
attained the double integration of individual and society and of society
and nature? Toynbee merely projects postulates which fulfil an emotional
need in the West into human groups whose values lie elsewhere. In our
own terms: Toynbee declares the “dynamism” of western civilization to be
universally valid; and he can do that only by ignoring the “form” of
non-western civilizations. But understanding is thereby precluded.
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:
Growth is achieved, when an individual, or a minority, or a whole
society, replies to a challenge by a response, which not only answers
the particular challenge that has evoked it, but also exposes the
respondent to a fresh challenge which demands a fresh response on his
part. And the process of growth continues, in any given case, so long
as this recurrent movement of disturbance and restoration and
overbalance and renewed disturbance of equilibrium is maintained.[31]