Critics of Marx have held that there cannot be a classless society unless the people constituting such a society are very gods come from heaven. It appears that in this last word of Marx he is jumping over his own skin and unconsciously finding himself in a universal classlessness, which is not very far from the principles of Hegel's doctrine, when properly understood in its profundity. Toynbee thinks that the chief danger to man is man himself, and he cannot be free from this source of fear unless he regenerates himself into characters that are truly human. History has to be studied as an entire process of values engendered in the consciousness of man and not as fractions of the political histories of nations or countries. The failures of nations and the fall of empires are due to the diminishing and virtual absence of creative power in the administration, the absence of a religious consciousness as the guiding principle in administration and, worst of all, the deification of the State as if it is a final reality in itself.
Examples are the events one can read in Greek and Roman history.
We may find them also present in the histories of earlier kingdoms, Babylonian, Assyrian and Egyptian. Edward Gibbon, in his classic study of the later days of Roman history, traces its decline and fall to the very same evils which Toynbee points out in his study. The need, then, for a human survival, is the need for a revival of true religious awareness for the continuance of civilisation, the working out of a constitutional cooperative system of a possible world government, and generating workable compromises of the economic system providing means for personal enterprise together with contributing towards a socialistic pattern of equity and justice. Lastly, the need is for the secular structure to base itself on a strong religious foundation, religion meaning a perpetual consciousness of the universal values in life, ranging beyond all parochial and empirical considerations.