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The careers of Charlemagne and Timur Lenk reveal sharply the suicidalness of militarism. Their position as guardians of the civilization's marshes had placed great opportunities within their grasp. The importance of border provinces derives from the stimulating effect of their exposed position. The response to this challenge may carry the margrave into barbarian territory and thus vastly expand the civilization's geographical extend. ¹

Regarded from another point-of-view, the articulation of the marshes exhibits an aspect of the process of etherealization. By assuming the task of military defense they liberate the energies of the civilization for other tasks and continued creative endeavor.

Timur Lenk and Charlemagne failed to perform their proper function. They diverted their energies into the body of their own civilization, and commenced a civil war, the only issue of which could be social breakdown. The Iranian civilization did not long survive Timur's onslaught and Western Europe was saved from a similar fate only by the weakness of Charlemagne's sons and the fresh challenge presented by the Norsemen.

The intoxication of victory constitutes a special instance of the "active" nemesis of creativity in Toynbee's scheme. Rome's secular and spiritual history exhibits its symptoms. The victory over Hannibal so slackened Roman military discipline

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. IV. p. 491. This contradicts the concept that expansion is a symptom of decay.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. IV. p. 505.

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that the next century saw a series of defeats at the hands of
outmatched powers. In the spiritual field, Gregory had brought
the Church out of the depth of disrepute into which it had fallen
in the previous generations. But the initial successes against
the Empire, caused the Papacy to lose its sense of proportion.
The alliance with the Sicilian Norsemen sanctioned a use of
force that inextricably involved the church in the affairs of
this world. The fight to the death against the Hohenstauffen
ensued, symbolizing that idolization of an ephemeral self that
ever contains its own nemesis. Innocent III's seeming pre-
eminence only served to hide an inner weakness, of which the
Babylonian captivity was to bear witness before the end of the
century.

Thus the nemesis of creativity contains two possible
aberrations. The passive sin of resting on one's oar expresses
itself in the idolatry of the ephemeral. The active failure to
recognize limits proves the saying "that those who live by the
sword, shall perish by the sword". The inevitable penalty in
both cases is death.

Toynbee's concept of the breakdown of civilizations is
a necessary product of his metaphysical doctrine. If growth
discloses a successful response to recurrent challenges, then

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. IV. p. 506. This seems a better illustration for the passive aberration.

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breakdown must constitute the penalty for a failing self-deter-
nination. The necessity of decline is a function of a degener-
ating purposiveness, not of a cosmic inexorability. The mechan-
icalness of mimesis, the intractability of institutions and the
various aspects of the nemesis of creativity serve as the crit-
eria by which to evaluate social breakdown.

Yet no aspect of Toynbee's philosophy can free itself
from the difficulties and inconsistencies of his metaphysical
assumptions. To assert that civilizations break down as a re-
sult of some failure of will-power on the part of its members
is not refuting the doctrine of organic necessity. For, surely,
Spengler too would admit that individuals constitute the entities
of action. The key problem resides in the dilemma of human vol-
ition as the cause or the result of breakdown. This failing
response may itself constitute the manifestation of an immanent
decline.

Toynbee's ambiguous postulation of purposiveness is com-
pounded by his theory of society as a common field of activity.
If the intractability of institutions results from the difficulty
of modifying overlapping, dynamic fields, then the individual's
freedom of action is severely limited. The only portion left
for purposiveness would be that part of a person's sphere out-
side the common field. This in relation to the total range of
interaction must be, of necessity, small and insignificant.
Thus, Toynbee, substitutes a mechanism for an organism, an im-
mutable causality for an immanent Destiny.

1. On this point see Quotation cited post "Conclusion" p.

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The difficulty of uniting the metaphysical assumptions
with an empirical method constantly recurs. For what is the
meaning of sin in a pragmatic context? It never becomes clear
whether Toynbee condemns the Athenians for failing to understand
the profounder truth represented by Paul or for a faulty analy-
sis of the wave of the future.

No support can be found in historical data for the denial
of the inexorability of the decline, in the face of the collapse
of every heretofore existing civilization. The postulation of
a One True God in Christianity though a logical consequence of
Toynbee's theology, rejects the very pattern of recurrence
necessary to establish a historical Law. For a God can not be
both exclusive and the accidental result of a civilization's
decline.

The deficiency of moral standards implied by the use of
force may be well founded in theology, yet the only criterion
empirical data admits is failure. And so Toynbee's ultimate proof
resides in technical excellency, his final standard of values in
the ability to prevail.

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The Disintegration of Civilizations - Schism in the Body Social.

The breakdown of Civilizations issues into disintegration if the capacity to react to challenges becomes permanently stultified. The sense of frustration in the body social leads to an articulation into classes, the ever more violent conflict of which dissipates the strength of the civilization.

The analysis of the disintegration of civilizations represents the culmination of Toynbee's philosophy, the revelation of his metaphysical doctrine. Out of the ashes of the City of Destruction emerges a profounder level of world experience, the supra-mundane level of reality. The period of breakdown had prevented the creative forces of the civilization from realizing their potentialities. Though this static condition exhibits a level of Integration, its duration is ephemeral. Since it was attained outside of God's plan this type of Yin can not last. Against this negation of creativity, the secession of the internal proletariat constitutes a dynamic reaction. Yin changes to Yang again. Humanity proceeds on its journey up the precipice. The universal church which salvages the purposiveness in life gives content to the void in the soul and reveals truths of eternal validity.

Toynbee's metaphysical dilemmas are ever present, however. How can the accidental consequence of social breakdown embody the meaning of history? How can an empiricist evaluate

1. Or the sanction of evolution. Toynbee sways between the biological and the theological interpretation of history.

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the possible inward reactions to a state of disintegration?

Indeed, what does the soul's anguish matter except as it embodies itself institutionally? Toynbee's empiricism forces him to consider permanence a criterion for inward fitness. This raises the key problems of his philosophy. Does the growth and decay of civilizations contain the moral sanction of history, from which Man can learn rules not only for moral but at the same time of successful conduct? Does salvation or hope reside in phenomenal appearance or inner experience? It is the Kant's query again, the original dilemma restated, containing our meta-physical standard for the interpretation of Toynbee.

If breakdown reveals a failure of self-determination must it inevitably lead to disintegration? Toynbee turns to his "well-tried empirical method" for a solution. Just as birth did not necessarily involve growth - so breakdown does not inevitably lead to collapse. The alternative of disintegration is petrification, a state of creative impotence. Its dominant political form is a totalitarianism which accentuates the time-less evenness of existence, under which philosophy and art languish, but natural-science continues to grow.

Growth reveals a process of differentiation. The uniqueness of each challenge as a function of the previous response

1. For full discussion see post "Conclusions" And Appendix A - The Concepts of Meaning.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 10. This relies heavily on a combination of Spengler's Caesarism and fellah-state.

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determines the civilization's specific development and artistic
style. The opposite holds true for disintegration. There the
failure to meet the problem results in the continuous confront-
ation of the same challenge. The unhappy soul struggles in
vain, dissipating its inner strength in the futile attempt to
escape defeat. For each unsuccessful response causes an incre-
ment in the formidability of the challenge and a loss of capacity
to respond. Therefore every disintegration accomplishes itself
through standardization expressed in a universal state, a uni-
versal church and a Voelkerwanderung.

Toynbee finds one criterion for disintegration in the
existence of a schism in the body social, an articulation into
incompatible social groups. To be sure, the growth phase was
also characterized by class distinctions. ² But its organization
was hierarchical, the common devotion to values constituting the
social bond, the distinction into classes revealing merely a
technical division of labor. But now the claim of leadership
has evaporated and the creative minority rules by force. The
application of power makes a violent response in the uncreative
majority which forms the internal proletariat. And beyond the
civilization's border an external proletariat threateningly faces
the dominant minority.

Any attempt to heal the schism in the body social is
brought to failure for the loss of creativeness prevents any except

1. Toynbee Vol. V. p. 13. This is another instance of Toynbee's use of the word "soul" for a civilization. See post "Conclusions".

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 15.

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makeshift solutions. Toynbee believes that the Marxian philosophy accurately describes the condition of a civilization moving towards collapse amidst an ever greater accentuation of class oppositions. But the Old Testament strain in Marx also pointed the way towards a means of transcending this conflict. For the vision of the classless society; transcends economic aspirations and expresses man's longing for a Promised Land that reconciles all striving. Oppressors and oppressed will vanish and harmony will reign everywhere. This intuition of peace through suffering, of happiness through agony does not represent for Toynbee a bridging of the schism but its immanent purpose. 1

This is Palingenesia, the new level of Integration.

Schism-and-Palingenesia appears, like Withdrawal-and-Return, as another beat of the elemental rhythm, of which Yin and Yang represent phases. It exhibits the mechanism by which the condition of dynamic activity maintains itself. The schism represents the withdrawal. The dominant minority which clings to its position against all equity, has forced society into a static mould. The secession of the internal proletariat constitutes a dynamic response, the disturbance of the uneasy equilibrium. It withdraws to work out the solutions of the next phase of development. Its agony is shared by a small group of inspired personalities, the new creative minority, which utilizes the faculty of mimesis to control the mass of the internal proletariat. In relation to this

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 28.

2. Toynbee Vol. V. p. 26 (op. cit.)

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dynamic group, the dominant minority merely constitutes an enor-
mity,

When the work of creation has proceeded and found its
institutional embodiment in the universal church, Palingenesia en-
sues, the apprehension of a deeper meaning, the condition of a
1
fresh advance.

Each component of the disintegrating civilization develops
a distinctive institution in response to the challenge of decline.
The internal proletariat creates the Universal Church, the Dom-
inant minority founds the Universal State and the External Pro-
letariat forms itself into barbarian war-bands. Each institution
moreover allows for the articulation of an active and a passive
set of attitudes.

Its monopoly of force enables the dominant minority to
the universal state as a response to the challenge of the inter-
necine warfare of parochial states. Toynbee distinguishes three
characteristic human types as products of this military success,
the conqueror, exemplified by Alexander, the hangman and the
wastrel. The wastrel exemplifies the tremendous increase of
the material scale of life brought about by territorial expan-
sion. He appeared in the Roman aristocracy after the defeat of
Hannibal and in the Pyramid builders of Egypt. The hangman is
a familiar figure of the dominant minority of decaying civilizations,

1. This is the return-phase.

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represented by Titus in the Hellenic civilization and ranging
from the princes who consigned the Anabaptists to the pyre, to
the Nazis in the Western civilization.

Yet the dominant minority also produces different and
nobler individuals. The universal state brings peace to a suffer-
ing humanity after the intolerable "Period of Contending States".
Though its existence is ephemeral, the universal state in full
bloom develops administrators whose unselfishness and devotion
to duty hides the inner weakness of all institutions. This was
the condition of the Roman Empire in the 2nd century when the
excellence of its civil service achieved the deceptive bloom
which really was that society's Indian su...
Similarly the
changing ethos of the dominant minority in the West in the 20th
century has replaced the blatant exploitation of Colonial areas
with at least a lip service to the welfare of the indigenous
population.

The ethos of the administrator develops from the dominant
minority's most spiritual creation, the school of philosophy.
It transforms the Roman wolf into a Platonic watch-dog. It
weaves into the texture of the disintegrating society those moral
precepts which represent the only enduring results of its exist-
ence. Yet the universal state is beyond salvation. The union
between the dominant minority and philosophy is never complete.

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 41. This seems to date the dis-integration of the Western civilization several centuries before even Spengler.

2, Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 39.

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The Original Sin of Militarism constantly reappears, not to be
avoided by even the most high-minded rulers such as Marcus and
Julian.

The schools of philosophy express an attitude born of
frustration, a reaction to the inadequacies of life. Their ideal-
is Detachment, the contemplation that knows no social responsib-
ility, the withdrawal which is conceived as an end, the return
which exhibits an inner sacrifice. They find refuge from the
oppressive present in an assertion of determinism, of which the
triumph of Astrology in the Hellenic and Babylonian world furnish
the most notable examples. Philosophy does not represent the
ultimate answer to the inner void of the civilization. It may,
however, assist the dialectical formulation of the only true
solution, the higher religion. Finally when disintegration has
run its course, only the universal church remains as the chrysalis
of a new civilization into the body of which the dominant minor-
ity merges and disappears.

Toynbee conceives the internal proletariat as the product
of a state of mind, not of an economic condition. It is inspired
by a consciousness of having been deprived of its rightful place
in the community, of being in but not of a society, of being un-

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 79 (f.n.) See post "Conclusions" for discussion of this concept.

2. This criticism of Detachment seems contradicted by the very existence of Plato and Aristotle's political philosophy, which indicates some concern with the affairs of this world.

3. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 58 considers Cartesianism the Western counterpart of Determinism.

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wanted and useless. Its resentment inspires a constant applica-
tion of repressive measures which only serve to accentuate the
rift.

All declining societies contain an internal proletariat
recruited from three distinct sources: The disinherited and up-
rooted members of its own body social, the partially disinherited
components of alien conquered civilizations who are exploited
in their native environment and the doubly disinherited con-
scripts from subject populations whose exploitation involves
their transplantation. 1 The destruction of the Hellenic peas-
antry by the introduction of the Latafundias is paralleled in
the West by the pernicious consequences of the Enclosure movement.
The indigenous Syriac internal proletariat of the Hellenic civil-
ization has its counterpart in the Indian component of the West-
ern Great Society. 2 The institution of slavery blighted both
civilizations.

All the typical reactions of the dominant minority to
the pervasive sense of futility manifest themselves in the inter-
nal proletariat, as well. The arbitrariness of the rulers evokes
the rebellion of the oppressed. The "violent" response however,
can not succeed because of the dominant minority's monopoly of
force. Out of the bloody suppression of the slave rebellions in

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 66.

2. There seems no warranty for including India and other colonial dependencies in the Western society. The only connection between India and the West is on the technical (economic) and political plane. This, in Toynbee's terms, is a consequence of Western disintegration not of Indian inclusion in the Western Civilization.

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Sicily and the peasant and Anabaptist revolts in the West emerges an alternative response. The gentle attitude, exhibiting a provisional recognition of limits issues in a religion which is at once faced with the crucial dilemma of its existence. It must decide whether to use its hold on the hearts of the internal proletariat for the satisfaction of immediate political aims or whether to confine itself to the satisfaction of the greater spiritual wants.

Judaism chose the first alternative. Its nemesis became the futile search for a Messiah to actualize a parochial state. But Christ set Christianity firmly on the other path. His reprisal of Peter exhibits a final level of transcendental reconciliation which guaranteed the eventual triumph of Christianity. Similarly, Jewish survival, was not assured until the realization that the Kingdom of God was not an external state and that Man must abstain from all attempts to promote the Divine plan.

The spiritual superiority of the internal proletariat over the dominant minority becomes apparent in their comparative institutional embodiments. The Universal state is a child of militarism; the universal church exhibits a new level of inner reconciliation. The dominant minority's gentle response issues in a philosophy which preaches Detachment as the highest state of bliss and an idolatrous religion of self-worship in the form of the Divus cult.

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 75.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 76.

3. This is a good illustration of Toynbee's normative concepts.

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Toynbee finds most of these symptoms of disintegration
in the Western civilization as well. The dominant minority has
failed to solve the problem of the internecine warfare of par-
ochial states, the increasing violence of which multiplies the
internal proletariat. Its gentle response is a meaningless
theosophy, a re-emerging astrology and the idolatrous adoration
of nation-states.

The internal proletariat on the other hand, after its
unsuccessful violence in the Peasant's revolt, has learned in
many respects the ways of gentleness. The Quakers illustrated
by their prosperity that "the meek shall inherit the earth" and
"that honesty is the best policy". The violence of Marxism has
been tempered until it has been transformed into a likeness of
the dominant minority's totalitarian worship of the state. But
the miracle of Christianity represents the deepest manifesta-
tion of Western Gentleness. In the souls of races but a genera-
tion removed from slavery, Christianity has been revitalized and
again becomes a living force. The hold of the neopagan dominant
minority is visibly lessening and hope again flows through the
branches of Western Christendom. Toynbee expressed the belief
that this tottering civilization, which has been reduced to its
present state by the intoxication of victory over Physical Nature,

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 174. See post for discussion of this argument.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p.193.

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may become the first to escape its nemesis, to find peace through gentleness and life through Christ.

The external proletariat constitutes itself in response to the flagging inspiration of the civilization. During the growth phase the barbarian's mimesis had been directed towards the creative minority's cultural achievements. The area of contact between the two societies had been fluid, the extend of cultural radiation determined by the civilization's inner energy. But the emergence of the dominant minority sees a secession by the barbarians who now form the external proletariat. The boundary becomes fixed and the two antagonists face each other across a limes in an uneasy truce before the inevitable clash.

The external proletariat may continue to adopt the civilization's still superior technique, but the inner relationship has ceased and conflict is the unavoidable climax. For the external proletariat possesses effective means of physical resistance. In contrast to the internal proletariat, the majority of its members are outside the dominant minority's direct control. Moreover, the dominant minority is exposed to all the nemesis of creativity, while the external proletariat experiences constant additions. In strength from the ranks of the ever more disgruntled barbarians.

Violence is therefore the most typical reaction of the

1. For other illustrations see Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 76-194.

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external proletariat. Its institutional embodiment are the barbarian war-bands, whose penetration of the civilization's territory heralds the beginning of the interregnum. The external proletariat's religion reflects its change of outlook. The religion of Primitive Mankind exhibits a worship of the community in all its manifestations of which procreation and military defense are the most important. Thus the Goddess of fertility constitutes the primary religious symbolism of the earliest stage of development while the god of destruction plays a very subsidiary role. The emergence of a military frontier, however, engenders a social revolution. The energies of the community are henceforth directed towards conquest, with a consequent inversion of the relative importance of the procreative and destructive activities. The God of war appears as the Divinity towards which the worship of the external proletariat begins to be directed, a testimony to its choice of the attitude of Violence.

Even this period is not without its creativeness however.

The Homeric poems testify to a profundity of vision which was to be repeated in the English and Scandinavian epics. The external proletariat's conquests achieve permanence only after the barbarian war bands have accepted the universal church of the internal proletariat and under its gentle guidance created a new civilization. And so the history of the external proletariat, too, reveals the ultimate victory of Gentleness over

1. Boynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 233.

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Violence, the attainment of peace through strife. The City of
Destruction appears as ephemeral as the universal state and out
of its ashes rises the inner meaning of history, to which even
the barbarians must bow, the Universal Church.

The analysis of the disintegration of civilizations ex-
hibits the happiest application of Toynbee's pragmatic method.
For the inner contradictions of his metaphysical pattern are
here at a minimum. Whatever the cause of society's breakdown
its issue into disintegration discloses that inevitability, that
"standardization", for the apprehension of which an empirical
approach is ideally suited. All disintegration proceeds through
the agency of a dominant minority, a seceding internal prole-
tariat and invading barbarian war-bands. The schism in the body
social becomes ever wider, the frustration in the soul unbridge-
able. The possible reactions to this dilemma are limited and
confined to alternative violent or gentle responses. However
only the gentle responses contain the seeds of creativeness, only
the Universal Church possesses a future.

Yet even here Toynbee's normative pattern and its irre-
concillability with the historical data emerges. The truth of the
Universal Church seems in the final analysis merely founded on
its future, the evil of the repressive measures of the universal
state on their futility. "Honesty is the best policy" becomes

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 13.

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in Toynbee's interpretation of the Quakers primarily a maxim of prudent conduct. It is not apparent whether an inner attitude or a physical location characterizes the internal proletariat. Though Toynbee's emphasis on purposiveness makes him opt for the proletarization by willed secession, the account of the proletariat's recruitment supports the theory of geographical accident. The miracle of Christianity may cause its embodiment in the Universal of a second decaying civilization but this can have no bearing on the fate of the Western Civilization. For the essence of a Universal Church is the supra-mundane plane of reality. Its full meaning is only realized after disintegration has run its course and barbarian war bands toppled the City of Destruction. Christianity could then become the chrysalis-in Toynbee's scheme-of a new civilizations. But its conception as the material salvation of the West repeats that very sin for which Toynbee castigates Athens, the idolization of an ephemeral Self.

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The Disintegration of Civilizations-Schism in the Soul.

The mere description of the institutional manifestations of disintegration can never, for Toynbee, exhaust the essence of that process. Just as growth was revealed as a rhythm of progressive etherealization independent of the material conditions of command over the environment, just as breakdown resulted from failure in the capacity to respond successfully to recurrent challenges, so disintegration hides a deeper meaning. The schism in the body social represents merely a symptom of that profounder schism of the soul which is the real cause of society's collapse. The growth phase of the civilization had witnessed a consistent directedness in all fields of behavior, feeling and life. But with disintegration the possible reactions become polarized into inconclusive alternatives. A choice between the active and the passive option is the only freedom left to the soul which has lost its creativeness and which participates, either as villain or victim, in the social disintegration.

This aspect of Toynbee's philosophy results in a total breakdown of his method. The state of a soul is approachable in terms of empirical analysis only in its institutional embodiments. The interpretation of their inner meaning must remain a metaphysical construction. An attempt to derive historical laws from a categorization of states of mind which are really

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 375.

2. For discussion of this ambiguity see post "Conclusions".

3. See appendix A. The Concepts of Meaning.

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emansations of theological view-points, can not claim to base
itself on the surface manifestations of phenomenal appearance.
The full implications of Toynbee's concept of the Promethean
elen reveal themselves. Its immanent working had always seemed
to contradict the purposiveness postulated by challenge-and-
response. It now appears that any conscious attempt to change
the present condition constitutes the sin of archaism or futur-
ism, the penalty for which is disintegration. We are back with
Hegel's "whatever is, is right". We have not really transcended
Spengler. The problem of freedom and necessity remains unsolved.

Disintegration reflects the schism in a soul, which has
destroyed its creativity and whose collapse is approaching amidst
mounting frustration. Every aspect of life exhibits this inward
dilemma, no part of society can escape it. Yet since the prob-
lems faced by each component vary, the schism will reveal itself
in a different form in the typical reactions of each class.

Toynbee distinguishes several symptoms of inward frus-
tration on the planes of behavior, feeling and life. On the plane
of behavior the loss of creativity evokes the alternatives of
abandon and self-control, each an attempt to coax out of nature
the inspiration which has been wantonly destroyed. While the
dominant minority endeavors to recapture the charm of its youth,
either by giving reign to the passions or by their strict control,

1. For full discussion see post Conclusions.

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the internal proletariat seeks a substitute for the lost art of mimesis. The lack of leadership accentuates the inner helplessness of the mass. Its alternatives are truancy and martyrdom, a shirking of responsibility made possible by the breakdown of discipline or a conscious quest for a death that will finally end all uncertainty.

On the plane of feeling the reactions occur to a reversal of the Promethean elan by which growth had accomplished itself. The sense of drift exhibits the passive response, a resignation to the enigmatic Universe which under either the aspect of chance of Necessity accentuates the impotence of Man. When the failure is viewed subjectively the sense of sin appears, a recognition of an inward failure to master life, an admission of inadequacy, the condition for salvation.

The breakdown of growth is accompanied by a cessation of the differentiation which had produced the civilization's style. The sick soul loses its sense of form and gives vent to a feeling of promiscuity, expressed in the blending of incompatible values, the emergence of a cosmopolitan language, the syncretism of religion and philosophy. Yet the profounder souls of each society sense a profound meaning in the loss of style, an apprehension of unity behind the growth and decay of ephemeral institutions. The sense of unity conjures a Cosmos of eternal validity out of the chaotic appearance of the phenomenal world.

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 380.

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On the plane of life, the transfer of the field of action from the Macrocosm to the Microcosm, the etherealization, is replaced by two pairs of alternative modes of behavior. On this plane, however, there exists an option between a pair of violent and a pair of gentle responses, between the attempt of realizing one's aspirations on the material level or the apprehension of a deeper truth transcending mere appearance. Archaism and Futurism constitute the violent options, a projection of longing in Time, the quest for a Utopia which evades the challenge presented by the change in spiritual climate. ¹ The doom of this endeavor causes a violent eruption of the pent-up frustration and seals the doom of the society. When all material hopes are disappointed the gentle response re-emerges, the recognition by man of his limits, the humility which transcends itself, the faith that moves mountains. Detachment and Transfiguration, the bliss of contemplation and the salvation through God's love appear, the guarantee, at the eleventh hour, of the continuation of the meaning of life. ²

Any society contains creative personalities, agents of dynamic activity, embodiments of the new level of Yin. But a disintegrating society offers no obvious field of activity for leadership. Mimesis has broken down and attempts at revitalization are bound to be tentative and uncertain. As the schism in

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 383.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 391.

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the soul of the civilization becomes wider, the inspired individuals appear in the role of Saviours, their effectiveness determined by the attitude of life they represent. For Gentleness will always triumph over Violence, peace over discord, faith over materialism. God's love, the motive force of the Universe, shines as a beacon of mercy through the gloom of col-lapse.

Abandon and self-control constitute Toynbee's conception of the reactions of a soul which attempts to claim the sanction of nature for the absence of its creativeness. Abandon ascribes the loss of its inspiration to the inner separation from a state of nature and attempts to recapture its youth by giving free reign to all spontaneous appetites. Its representatives are Frasymachus and Alcibiades in the Hellenic civilization, Rousseau and Machiavelli in the West.

Self-Control, too, claims the sanction of Nature. Selva-tion from the intolerable present is sought in disciplining the base emotions, in the melancholy rejection of the world, of which 2 Marcus Aurelius and Savonarola furnish the outstanding examples.

Truancy and martyrdom represent the alternatives by which a leaderless mass seeks to find a substitute for the loss of direction induced by the collapse of mimesis. Just as in an army the relaxation of discipline offers a moral excuse for the

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 175.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 403.

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shaking of danger so truancy in a disintegrating society appears as an alternative to the purposiveness which has become oppressive. This was the reaction of Sparta and Athens at a time when only unity could prevent a Roman hegemony over Greece. This, too, is the meaning of the "irreligious toleration" of the West which has cut itself off from its spiritual heritage and substituted a secular idol in the form of the national state for the spiritual basis of its greatness.

Yet the sceptre of defeat may cause other minds to attempt to salvage their ideals by courting death without any hope of material reward. Socrates refused all chances to play truant and met a martyr's death. In its hour of trial, the Christian church steadfastly refused the very tempting and very easy escape of formal allegiance to the Divus. The blood of her martyrs finished the condition of her eventual triumph. As an indication that the spirit of the martyrs is yet with us, Wolsey and Moore chose death rather than the ignominy of truancy.

Toynbee turns next to an examination of the impact of disintegration on the plane of feeling. The loss of the Promethean elan of growth faces the soul with the very negation of existence, from which the sense of drift and the sense of Sin represent antithetical methods of refuge. The feeling of drift appears as the consequence of an idolatry of Necessity or Chance,

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 411. For a discussion of these illustrations see post Conclusions.

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a sin which inevitably leads to breakdown. Necessity and Chance are correlative as the expressions of a soul which represents its defeats subjectively as blind disorder and its objective operation under the aspect of Inevitability. The West has wor-shipped Chance since laissez-faire was elevated into an ethical principle. But Fate, too, has been the subject of adoration. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination, the counterpart of the Hellenic Tyche, introduced determinism into the lives and fortunes of human beings. ¹

But while an idolatry of Fate may serve as an opiate in instilling in the soul an acquiescence in a disaster assumed to have its root in external circumstances, its counterpart, the sense of sin acts as a powerful stimulus. Man turns inward for an explanation of his failure and attempts to make himself worthy of receiving God's grace. The road from an unconquerable Necessity to a conquerable Sin is the saving truth which prevented Judaism from rushing headlong into disaster through the idolization of an Ephemeral Self. ² The Hellenic Civiliza-tion had to discover this great truth slowly, but the West was fortunate in growing out of the chrysalis of a higher religion. Nothing illustrates the perversity of human nature better than the Western hostility to its noble heritage, the repudiation of which may well doom the Great Society. Only by repenting can

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 430. For the lack of inner relationship between Tyche and Calvin see post "Conclusions". It would seem to fit much better under Sense of Sin.

2. See ante p.

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1

Western man save himself from the nemesis of his ate.

A sense of promiscuity appears as the passive substitute for the sense of style which has disappeared with the breakdown of society. Toynbee finds its influence in all spheres of activity and in all social classes. The dominant minority exhibits the most pronounced tendencies towards promiscuity. Its military technique is usually an amalgam of the successful methods of neighboring civilizations. An extensive dilution accompanies the expansion of the army the insatiable requirements of which are the consequence of the campaigns for attaining the universal state. Common military service vulgarizes the dominant minority. The lack of inward strength forces the dominant minority to follow the immediate trend. When Christianity was small and without popular support, the persecutions of Rome were persistent, if half-hearted. But once Christianity had achieved a position of eminence, the dominant minority reluctantly followed the internal proletariat's lead, by announcing its own conversion.

The dominant minority's barbarization matches its vul-
garization. The establishment of a military frontier across
which the external proletariat ever threatens to erupt testifies

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 439.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 439. This of course may be the secret of their success.

3. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 456.

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to a barbarian war-band's feat-of-arms. Since the moral fiber
of the dominant minority is steadily degenerating the balance
along the limes inclines in the barbarian's favor. The attempt
to solve this challenge by enrolling the barbarian war-bands in
the universal state's military service ends with the dominant
minority a prisoner in its own house. This was the case in Rome,
and may occur with the Indian army, the large majority of which
is recruited from the external proletariat.

Vulgarity in Art and Manners is a concomitant of disintegration. The Western artist consciously turns his back on his great tradition, as did his Hellenic predecessor. Nigger dances and a Byzantine architecture constitute expressions which must remain ever foreign to the souls of a true Western creator, 1
dooming their present improvisators to sterility. In the field of language the sense of promiscuity reveals itself in the replacement of a local distinctiveness by a general confusion of 2
tongues. The requirements of communication in a universal state lead to the emergence of a lingue franche, such as Aramaic and Latin in the Hellenic and English in the Western civilization.

Religious syncretism, too, is a manifestation of the
sense of promiscuity which arises from the Schism of the Soul
in an age of disintegration. 3
The history of all universal
states exhibits a convergence towards a common type in both
religion and philosophy.
The Stoa dominated all philosophic

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 481. Note dependence of this concept on Spengler.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 494.

3. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 527.

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discussion during Rome's last centuries and there was little
difference between the various religious cults.

The final manifestation of the sense of promiscuity is
the syncretism between religion and philosophy which announces
the impending triumph of the internal proletariat's universal
church. Philosophy offers little more than the dialectic under-
pinning for the proper formulation of church dogma. The oppres-
siveness of the void in the souls of both the dominant minority
and the internal proletariat, the similarity of their frustra-
tion will of necessity issue in a common religious experience.
Yet this identity of feeling can not be maintained. The philos-
ophies degenerate into mere superstition because their appeal is
too exclusively directed towards the intellectual faculties.
The universal church attains that depth of understanding which
enables it to serve as repository of all the hopes and the guar-
antor of the fulfillment of the disinterating civilization.

Since Toynbee postulates alternative responses to the
frustrations of feeling, the sense of promiscuity can not con-
stitute the only reaction to the civilization's loss of style.
While the blending of all forms during the period of disintegra-
tion exhibits to weak souls an immanent Chaos, the steadier
spiritual vision may regard this trend as the revelation of an
underlying unity. The phenomenal world reveals flickering

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 1.

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manifestations which only serve to hide the eternal truth just
below the surface. The first intuition of the sense of unity
arises through the appearance of the universal state. The
Saviour with the Sword strives for that unification of mankind,
which Alexander denoted with concordia. However, the violence
of its creation seals the doom of the universal state. It is
ever plagued by the militarism that created it, externally
through constant warfare, and internally through the inter-
mittent persecution of its minorities. Its inner contradictions
cause the collapse of the universal state and bring to naught
the enterprise of the Saviour with the Sword.

The apprehension of unity remains, magnified in the
hearts of the members of the internal proletariat whose specific
national existence has been destroyed. The religions of even
primitive societies reveal the truth that the terrestrial plane
can never satisfy man's striving for universality, expressed in
a solidarity of the savage's soul with the tribal God in a super-
human dimension. Mundane reality can not achieve the unity of
brotherly love without the common recognition of the kingdom of
God. The gradual realization of the importance of the celestial
plane is strengthened through the oppression by the Universal
state. The tribal God whose initial function had consisted of
the protection of physical existence, now becomes the sole guar-
antee of tribal individuality, the chief hope for deliverance.

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 178.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 13.

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Since conditions clearly do not warrant the expectation of liberation, the apocalyptic vision of a God arises, whose judgment contains the moral sanction of history. The immediate attainment of material hopes is renounced, though the ultimate realization of the exclusive validity of the supra-mundane plane still awaits a profounder vision.

Two conceptions of unity permeate the Universal state, derived from its political organization. The omnipotence of the ruler leads to the exaltation of the transcendence of God and the uniformity of justice to the postulation of the Supremacy of Law. The dominant minority is acutely conscious of the potency of law which constitutes not merely an engine of administration, but a force in itself. With the exaltation of Law, the personality of God grows progressively fainter. This was the condition of the Achaemenian Empire, of Babylon and of the West since the triumph of Physical Science.

The other representation of the unity of the Universe as the work of an omnipotent God, with the Law as merely an emanation of God's will discloses the typical reaction of the internal proletariat. The various tribal Gods of the subject internal proletariat tend to develop a standard type, for they are now all alike exposed to the oppression of the same human monarch. In the contest of the Gods of the internal proletariat the most exclusive God usually triumphs, for in his exclusiveness resides

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 18.

2. Toynbee op. cit. p. 19.

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the proof of his living existence, and in his jealousy the certainty of maintaining an unimpaired identity. Thus Yahwe outran all competitors for the soul of the internal proletariat of the Hellenic world enabled Christianity to develop its apprehension of the unity of One True God into a Universal Church.

On the plane of life Toynbee distinguishes the same incompatibility of reactions that the planes of behavior and feeling exhibited. Here, however, two pairs of violent and gentle responses arise, each containing an antinomy of possible attitudes. Archaism and futurism constitute the violent pair. Archaism Toynbee defines as the attempt to remount the stream of time in the hope of attaining the happy condition of a happier period which now appears as the Golden Age. It operates in the same fields as promiscuity, Conduct, Art, Language and Religion. But while promiscuity reveals a spontaneous feeling resulting from the loss of style, archaism represents a conscious effort, strenuously pursued of recreating institutions of a happier time. In politics the reintroduction of the Roman censorship in 250 is paralleled by the veneration accorded to the English kingship.

Archaism in art expresses itself in the neo-Gothic building style of the West, in the adoration by the Renaissance of the past. In the field of language a tour de force results. The frantic attempt to purge all words of foreign origin from

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 49.

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the language, does not take into account the complete interdependence of all Indo-European languages and constitutes the confession of a defeated soul.

Archaism is doomed to futility. It fights against the "impetus of a life which it can never arrest" and attempts to re-achieve an irretrievable past. The frustration of the endeavor leads its practitioners to resort to violence and thus hastens their defeat. When archaism has come to the full realization of its impotence an abrupt turn in direction occurs and the soul plunges into the equally hopeless, but more deeply meaningful way of Futurism.

Where archaism attempts to remount the stream of Time, Futurism rushes headlong in the opposite direction in its flight from an intolerable present. This attitude is even more contrary to human nature and consequently requires a tour de force of a still higher pitch. Futurism in the field of manners reveals itself in the adoption of outlandish dress and manners, of which Kemal Ataturk's and Peter the Great's reforms furnish Toynbee's outstanding examples. Its institutional manifestations proceed on the assumption that the organs of social life can be re-made by fiat. Thus Hitler rearranged the German administrative map and Peter the Great westernised Russia.

Futurism "fares better than it has any right to expect".

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 63

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 97. This concept is discussed in post "Conclusions".

3. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 109. These examples seem to prove the success of futurism.

4. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 101.

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It constitutes the reaction of a transplanted internal prole-
tariat, prevented forever from returning to its former state.
Goaded into physical revolt by the dominant minority's oppres-
sion, it sets an apocalyptic vision before its eyes to take
courage in the desperate enterprise. Its fulfillment will be
nothing less than an inversion of the present order, a change
of roles between the slaves and the masters. This was the Jewish
reaction to the Roman and Persian occupations, the conjuring up
of a Messiah who would transform the agony into bliss by the es-
tablishment of an Israeli Commonwealth. The mundane world re-
mains the center of hope. It took the catastrophic defeats of
the Maccabees to teach Jewry the lesson of deeper spiritual in-
sight, the recognition that the True Kingdom of God does not
lie in this world. This intuition is transfiguration, the ap-
prehension of the supra-mundane plane of reality.

The practiceers of archaism and futurism appear on the
scene as savours with the time-machine. They arise in all
classes of the disintegrating society. The external proletar-
iat develops its savior-archaists who seek to return to the happy
days before the civilization's impact and whose reaction is yio-
lence. The dominant minority also produces saviour-archaists.
When they act in the field of foreign relations, their policy
results in a fiasco, such as Justinian's attempt to revive the
ghost of the Western Roman Empire. When they attempt to remedy

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 131.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 213.

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social conditions they are disowned by their own class for the
internal proletariat's loss has been the dominant minority's
gain. These outlaw-saviours include frequently some of the
noblest souls of the dominant minority. They are joyously re-
ceived by the internal proletariat whose vague ideology attains
form under their influence. The disappointment of the Internal
Proletariat's futuristic hopes is given meaning by these outlaw
saviours. The City of Destruction is transcended, the City of
God brought into view.

Archaism and Futurism reveal the pair of violent res-
ponses to the emptiness of life, Detachment and Transfiguration
furnish the gentle variations in Toynbee's scheme. Just as the
experience of the impracticability of futurism leads to self-
transcendence, so the frustration of archaism issues in the
3
Philosophy of Detachment. The sorrow of a disintegrating society
is evaded by a withdrawal from life, a quest for salvation
through meditation. It finds bliss in a willless resignation,
an escape from existence in which Death appears as welcome
oblivion. Detachment implies not only a rejection of life, but
a love of its negation. As an intellectual achievement, Toynbee
considers this philosophy imposing but its moral consequences
4
are repulsive. For Detachment implies a purging of all passions,

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 237.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 241. Toynbee included Lenin in the category of out-law saviors.

3. This contradicts previous assertion that archaism leads to Futurism.

4. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 132.

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of pity and love as well as the baser emotions.

The Stoic ideal of indifference to suffering, repeated in Buddhism, involves the reason for the defeat of Detachment. By appealing to the head to the exclusion of the heart the Philosopher tears asunder what God has joined together. For failing to divine this truth, the philosophy of Detachment is superseded by the mystery of Transfiguration.

The Philosopher marked by a king represents Toynbee's conception of the creative personality of this attitude of life. The ambiguity of his position dooms the philosopher's endeavor. The universal state in which such individuals appear is the product of force and the sin of Violence ever haunts its steps. Even if the sword is temporarily sheathed, internal tensions will force its reappearance. Indeed the Platonic philosophy implies the necessity of the use of force. Though basing the republic on a recognition by everyone of the division of labor, Plato negates this lip service to popular consent by uniting the executive and the military. The philosopher's direct inspiration can reach but a few, leadership of a social organization must always rely on mimesis. The philosopher masked by a king can not provide the real saviour of society. By acting politically he troppasses on the king's proper field of ruthless deeds, while the king stultifies himself in attempting to practice Detachment. His acts of violence turns him into a Saviour with the

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 138.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 242.

3. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 259. This seems to confirm Spengler's two worlds. World-as-History and World-as-Nature. See post Conclusions.

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Sword. Detachment offers no ultimate solution to the schism in
the soul and only transfiguration remains, the experience which
contains the true meaning of history.

When the soul's quest for relief from the tensions of disintegration has been stymied at every turn, there emerges a deeper level of historical existence, the recognition of the Kingdom of God. Christ Crucified, will always constitute a stunting block for futurists, because He offers no guarantee of material reward. He will remain foolishness for the philosophers who can not grasp the reason for a return to the world after such a hard-won withdrawal. The Kingdom of God, of which Christ Crucified is King, nevertheless has meaning, though its dimensions are not commensurable with any mundane criterion. It exists in this world though not of it, extending into Eternity and the Infinite, in a supra-mundane, spiritual sense.

The connecting link between the two planes is Christ Jesus, exhibiting both a divine and a human nature. Yet how can these two natures be present in a single person? Toynbee assumes that the accessibility of the Divine essence depends on the possession of a faculty common to God and Man. Since love is man's noblest faculty, its absence in God, would make Him a spiritually inferior being (quod ad absurdum). Thus the very emotion which

1. Transfiguration has been fully explained ante-Metaphysics.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 156-162. Toynbee discusses at length how something can exist in this world though not of it. See f.n. ante Section "Metaphysics".

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the philosophers attempt to excoriate guarantees the realiza-
tion of God's purposes. Love, flowing from God to Man and evok-
ing an answering response that on earth runs in the channel of
a feeling of brotherhood constitutes the essence of transfigur-
ation, the assurance of the supra-mundane plane.

The Kingdom of God contains the hope for salvation from
the schism in the soul, the sole condition for inward peace. The
only Saviour whose claims Toynbee considers of eternal validity
is the God Incarnate in Man. He arises in all civilizations,
though in various guises. In the Hellenic world He first ap-
peared as a blind Necessity which offered the no hope and found
no lasting acceptance. The demi-god who endures human suffering
reveals a profounder understanding. But the longing of humanity
has concentrated on the God who appears as a Man, on the Father-
hood of God, whose love was so great that He sacrificed His son
to give blessedness to his own. For salvation can only be at-
tained by suffering and the Saviour-God must experience the
depths of human agony. This represents the symbolism of Heracles
and Orpheus, of Tamus and Osiris, of Attis and Christ. Yet
Toynbee applies a final criterion. Though all these gods suf-
fered on behalf of humanity the ultimate merit of the sacrifice
resides in the spirit in which it was endured. Of all the Gods-
Incarnate-in-Man only Christ meets this test. His death is not

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 166.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. V. p. 259.

3. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 272-275. Toynbee engages in a long syllogism on the question of the Son's birth whether by procreation of adoption. For discussion see post "Conclusions".

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suffered in resignation or in sadness but reveals that trans-
cendental Love with which God loves this world, "so that whoso-
ever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting
life".

The road to Christ, to the Kingdom of God, contains the
only lasting hope of mankind, the true purpose of history, the
condition of eternal life. "The member of the disintegrating
society who has taken this road has a surer hope and therefore
a deeper happiness than the merely 'once-born' member of a mun-
dane society that is still in growth; for he has learned the
saving truth that the Most High hath not made one world, but
two, and that the human wayfarer who still finds himself a so-
journer in This World is not on that account beyond the pale of
the Other World but is travelling all the time within the King-
dom of God and is at liberty to live as a citizen of that omni-
present commonwealth her and now, if he is willing with all his
heart to pay allegiance to Christ the King and to take upon him-
self those obligations of citizenship which Christ has consec-
rated by fulfilling them in person. This entry into the Kingdom
of God is a second birth, and, for the once-born denizen of This
World, the discovery that it is possible to obtain this freedom
is like finding treasure hid in a field, or finding one pearl
of a great price".

¹

Toynbee's journey through history ends with a paean of

Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 168.

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mysticism, a rejection of This World, a hope for salvation through Christ. The theological foundation of his philosophy appears in full clarity. The defeated soul of a disintegrating civilization has exhausted all alternatives for healing its schism. Finally the "truth" emerges that true blessedness is not attained in this world, but results from a recognition of the Kingdom of God, of infinite extend and eternal duration. This is Transfiguration, an emanation of God's love, the apprehension of the supra-mundane plane of reality. Its achievement and the recognition of the subsidiary importance of This World does not constitute an act of truancy but a withdrawal according to a plan in which the God incarnate as Man, the Saviour, leads 1 Humanity towards a New Jerusalem.

The reliance on Dante is obvious. With transfiguration the Pilgrim has reached Paradise. Now his mind is at one with the Love of God and terrestial bonds fall away. Here everything is bliss, with will and necessity harmonized, with Time at a standstill and Space no longer an obstacle. The greater "truth" appears to man, of the insignificance of mundane affairs, of the transcendental reprieve which God gives to those who repent.

But the nobility of this conception is marred by an empirical method which recognizes no mysteries and imposes its causal patterns on all spiritual manifestations. The alternative ways of behavior, feeling and life are metaphysical emanations of a theological viewpoint, which will not be buttressed

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 279.

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by any, however vast, amount of empirical data. Christ's moral
superiority in the "Battle of the Gods" is derived from his
readiness to sacrifice himself. This, however, represents a
value judgment not a necessary conclusion from historical events.

1

The alternative, seem to fit all conditions of life with no
necessary relation to disintegration. The supporting data in-
cludes such incommensurables as Hitler's abolition of the old
administrative system, Peter's shearing off of beards, Japan's
modernization, all as symptoms of a suicidal futurism. Nothing
could illustrate better the frustration of an empirical docu-
mentation that must ever confine itself to the mere phenomenal
appearance which reflect the noumena, the soul.

The assertion of purposiveness of the first five volumes
has disappeared. Nothing can really save This World. Indeed
should it be saved? For only through the disintegration of Civil-
izations, in Toynbee's terms, does Man learn to know God.

3

1. Unless, of course, one attempts to equate morality with success.

2 See post "Conclusions".

3 See post "Conclusions", for full discussion of these points.

1
Conclusions:

Toynbee's philosophy represents an attempt to transcend
the conception of history as an organism continuously reproduc-
ing new manifestations of power. The inevitability of decline
and the inexorability of a development through determined stages
are replaced by an assertion of purporziveness. Challenge-and-
response represents the mechanism by which growth accomplishes
itself, the intrusion of an alien element into the perfection
of creation, the foil which evokes a new phase of activity.
History exhibits a continual alternation of static repose and
creativity, of Integration and Differentiation, of Yin and Yang.

All progress results from the civilizations whose birth
heralded a new stage in an evolutionary rhythm which permeates
all existence. Civilizations are not organic beings whose des-
tiny determines their history but merely fields of activity, the

1. Limitations of space have forced me to confine the discussion to a criticism of Toynbee's philosophical position and those concepts central to Toynbee's scheme. Therefore, I did not explore inconsistencies which do not affect Toynbee's central argument such as Toynbee's hint that Russia may be the new creative minority of the West (a growth criterion) while spending considerable effort in implying that the West is in a stage of breakdown. A similar contradiction is the argument that geographical expansion accompanies breakdown if set against a previous description of the stimulus of new ground. Again, Toynbee proves that a civilization's influence over neighboring societies is greatest during the period of decline, while at the same time including India in the Western civilization because of her adoption of Western technology. These inconsistencies while reflecting on Toynbee's exactness of thinking, do not however, invalidate his central position. (For my criteria see Appendix A - The Concepts of Meaning. - For other inconsistencies see my foot-notes on previous sections.)

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common ground of action of their constituents. Their dynamism
expresses itself in the direction of mimesis, a social drill,
which serves as a substitute for the direct absorption of in-
spiration from the creative minority. Yet the process of growth
is fraught with dangers. Mimesis breaks down because of its
mechanicalness and the creative minority succumbs to the nemesis
of the idolatry of the ephemeral instead of the eternally true.
Civilizations do not break down because of an inevitable fatal-
ity, but commit suicide.

The repeated failure to respond to a challenge leads to disintegration the first manifestations of which appear as a schism in the body social. The creative minority substitutes force for charm, and evokes a correspondingly violent reaction from the seceding internal proletariat. The barbarians beyond the borders constitute themselves as an external proletariat whose constant threat across a military frontier gradually saps the energy of the dominant minority.

The schism in the body social is paralleled by a schism
in the soul. All alternative ways of behavior, feeling and life
appear doomed. Then out of the collapse of material hopes arises
the vision of the ultimate meaning of human suffering, the real
embodiment of historical existence, the Kingdom of God, with
Christ as King. The soul which had defeated itself on the muni-
dane plane understands the inmanence of God's love and through

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repentance and humility may win its way to salvation.

Toynbee's common-sense approach, which pretends to derive its conclusions from a vast and impressive collection of empirical data hides great complexities. The incommensurability of his metaphysics and the empirical data, the logical antinomy of his position present themselves at every stage of Toynbee's philosophy. The realm of theology and the field of natural laws can be reconciled only with extreme difficulty. Does history reveal the gradual unfolding of a divine purpose? Or is history a natural force, obeying well-understood laws of evolution, through which a rhythm of self-implementation appears for the discerning? Does history, finally, constitute merely the common field of activity of the constituent civilizations, its standard purposive self-determination, with disintegration the penalty for an inward failure?

These three questions exhibit Toynbee's conflicting tenencies. The assertion of purposiveness in the first two volumes is soon revealed as but the emanation of a biological evolutionary development which proceeds from Yin to Yang, from Integration to Differentiation. In these terms Challenge-and-Response constitute merely beats of an elemental rhythm and a description of the operation of inevitability, not a denial of its necessity.

Toynbee's metaphysical assumptions derive from a theology in the medieval tradition of Dante, in which Love constitutes

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the motive-force of the universe and This World is conceived as
but the preparation for the Kingdom of God. For this reason He
 submit s the evolutionary manifestations of the Elan Vital to a
normotive criticism which rejects militarism as an original sin
and which judges all actions by their aptness for the attain-
ment of the Kingdom of God. The criticism of the typical atti-
tudes of a soul are less descriptions of the alternatives of a
disintegrating society than the denial of the substantiality of
all secular activity. In the final analysis only the King-
dom of God matters. Mundane success hides the inner hollowness
of political institutions, the existence of which ever depends
on violence.

The difficulties of Toynbee's position are compounded
by the utilization of an empirical approach whose exhibition of
deep learning tends to obscure its methodological shallowness.
Empirical analysis relies on a recognition of recurrent situa-
tions. The formulation of laws requires a comparability of
phenomena. The inner meaning of these manifestations can not

1. Toynbee's categories of archaism, futurism and promiscuity lead to this conclusion. It is obvious that all activity must fit one of these classifications. For example, Toynbee investigates the Renaissance for its traditionalism and the modern West for its rejection of traditional art-styles. Similarly, Peter's reforms in Russia, Japan's modernization, Napoleon's administrative reforms are criticized as symptoms of a suicidal futurism while the retention of the British King and the organization of the Parliament of Westminster on the basis of territory instead of corporations is described as the emanation of an archaism doomed to self-destruction.

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enter into calculations, the uniqueness of experience constitutes a contradiction in terms. An empirical method is therefore unsuited for the demonstration of a theological view which must of necessity rest on a transcendental experience. To be sure, a philosophy of history based on theology is feasible, as Bossuet and Niebuhr demonstrate. Yet their formulation derives, in the first instance, from a frank recognition of a normative pattern and a profound metaphysics.

Two consequences result from Toynbee's attempt to combine his theological and biological approach. Survival, which in an evolutionary development becomes the only criterion of inner fitness is given divine sanction. Sin denotes the Causality of which failure constitutes the phenomenal manifestation. Success represents the reward for moral action. This Calvinist concept

1. For example of the utilization in terms of mundane success of even the concept of Transfiguration see the following quote: Toynbee Vol. VI. p. 321. "What response to this challenge is Christian to make? Is he going to look this way or that as if he would run, yet stand still because he can not tell which way to go - until the fire from heaven duly descends upon the City of Destruction and the wretched hoverer perishes in a holocaust which he has so dismally foreboded without ever bringing himself to the point of fleeing from the wrath to come. Or will he begin to run - and run on crying 'Life! Life! Eternal Life!' with his eyes set on a shining light and his feet bound for a distant wicked - gate? If the answer to this question depended on nobody but Christian himself, our knowledge of the uniformity of human nature might induce us to predict that Christian's imminent destiny was Death and not Life. But in the classic version of the myth we are told that the human protagonist was not left entirely to his own resources in the hour that was decisive for his fate. According to John Bunyan, Christian was saved by his encounter with the Evangelist. And, inasmuch as it can not be supposed that God's nature is less constant than Man's, we may and must pray that a reprieve which God has granted to our society once, will not be refused if we ask for it again in a contrite spirit and with a broken heart."

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Is, of course, not inconsistent with an assertion of purposiveness, for the only indication of God's favor in a world of dark uncertainties is the temporal eminence achieved by strenuous exertion. It does, however, define morality in terms of ability to prevail and hardly differs, from Spengler's concept of necessity as the sole guide to action.

On the other hand, the impossibility of uniting general laws with the unique merit of Christianity issues in a rejection of phenomenal reality. All possible attitudes towards life are seen to fail in achieving that permanence which alone can indicate the attainment of the Kingdom of God. Throughout Toynbee's analysis of the schism in the soul, the tendency to reject all worldly ambition as sham becomes more pronounced. The doom of mutability, the transitoriness of existence, the unresolved mystery of the decline of civilizations all derive meaning from an affirmation of the eternal validity of the Kingdom of God.

The biological and theological view are found to be irreconcilable, after all. The Elan Vital operating through challenge-and-response leads a succession of climbers upwards on a precipice towards a ledge where the species becomes transformed into superman and the inspiration of the mundane creative minority unnecessary. Yet the failure to successfully reach this new level of integration produces as a concomitant of disintegration the universal church, the repository of the only true

On this point see Friedrich - Inevitable Peace - p. 111.

Also Friedrich - Althusius.

See ante for my criticism of this concept.

Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI.

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meaning of existence. This implies, that either the evolution-
ary process is a chimera, the very unattainability of which
teaches man his limitations or that the new state of Yin by
definition excludes the necessary validity of the higher relig-
lons. No compromise between these two attitudes is possible.
The pervasiveness of the elemental rhythm reduces the universal
church to the incidental by-product of disintegration. The
eternal applicability of Christianity denies the substantiality
of worldly endeavor and makes the precipe a stage of transi-
tory futility. If man succeeds in transforming himself he will
never have known a higher faith. The appearance of religion,
again, signals the doom of worldly endeavor. What is the real
tragedy in Toynbee, the birth of civilizations or their disin-
tegration?

Toynbee has not resolved Spengler antinomies but sharpened
them by an insistence, whatever his denials, on a hint from God,
expressed in success, regarding the merit of activity. The two
realms of History and Causality, of Time and Space, of Destiny
and Morality remain incommensurable. For Spengler, too, had ad-
mitted a religious experience, but explicitly affirmed its dis-
tinctness from history or in Toynbee's terms its rejection of
mundane success: "My kingdom is not of this world. This is the
final word which admits of no gloss and on which each must check
the course wherein birth and nature have set him. Pulsation or

1. In Toynbee's definition of Transfiguration.

2. Since religions only arise as by-products of the schism in
the body social in Toynbee's scheme.

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tension, history or nature, politics or religion - here it is
one or the other, there is no honest way of compromise. A states-
man can be deeply religious, a picus man can die for his country -
but they must, both, know on which side they are really stand-
ing. There is no bridge between directional Time and timeless
Eternity, between the course of history and the existence of a
divine world-order. This is the final meaning of the moment in
which Pilate and Christ confronted one another." This, in the
abrupt language of Spengler, expresses the full implication of
Toynbee's concept of transfiguration.

Toynbee's methodology adds to these inconsistencies.
It offers no support for the assumption of an Elan Vital mani-
festing itself in progress. It structures all historical ap-
pearances into a Causality, the essence of which is expressed
by temporal or spatial succession. Thus Toynbee ascribes the
decline of the Holy Roman Empire to the gradual displacement of
the ruling dynasty from the frontier marshes to the interior
provinces, the reduced challenge of which impaired the intensity
of the response. This seems to mistake what represented at best

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 216.

2. It may be interesting to compare Spengler's quotation with the following statement by Toynbee: "In fact the philosopher-king is bound to fail because he is attempting to unite two contradictory natures in a single person. The philosopher stultifies himself by trespassing on the king's field of ruthless action, while conversely the king stultifies himself by trespassing on the philosopher's field of levelless and pitiless contemplation."

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1

a manifestation of inner weakness for its cause. Moreover, though the Hohenstaufen were perhaps instrumental in bringing about the nadir of the Imperial position, and though their ancestral territories lay rather in the center of the Empire, their doom can hardly be said to have resulted from a deficiency in reactive ability.

Again, Toynbee considers the sudden decrease in cultivation and prosperity upon crossing the German-Lithuanian frontier a demonstration of the existence of an excessive climatic challenge. The very occurrence of an abrupt transformation should have cautioned Toynbee against postulating climatic change as the key factor, however. An examination of history, moreover, will disclose a variety of reasons for the deficiency in economic development of this border region between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, the West and the Slaves.

Yet such a single-factor analysis is the logical consequence of the application of the methods of natural science to historical phenomena. Historical events represent unique occurrences, products of the impact of creative personalities on an organic environment to be analyzed causally only in their determined aspects. Though Toynbee realized this in theory, his emphasis is ever on a quest for the apprehension of immutable laws, of which his Law of Race or Law of Compensation furnish

1. Though even this is highly debatable point.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. II. p. 304.

3. For full development see post "The Sense of Responsibility". Also Collingwood, "Idea of History" p. 169.

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examples. The tendency to consider all manifestations comparable triumphs over the mere postulation of the unpredictability of events. But comparability for natural science implies qualitative equivalence. Only quantitative differences exist for the empiricist.

This leads to a superficiality of classification which draws conclusions from mere surface phenomena. Thus because a universal state preceded disintegration in most civilizations, each appearance of an inclusive political organization heralds the breakdown of its society. The Empire of the Romanoffs represents as certain a criterion for the decline of the Russian civilization, as the appearance of Augustine's creation for the impending disintegration of Hellenic civilization. For this reason, too, the introduction of the Western alphabet by Mustapha Kemal, the abolition of the Laender system by Hitler, the administrative reforms of the French revolution, the political creation of Peter the Great are all considered emanations of the same futurism, equally doomed to self-destruction.

Since each disintegrating society has an external proletariat, all attacks from beyond a civilization's borders must fit this category. The Sassanid Empire's onslaught on declining Byzantism is paralleled by the incessent warfare in the Russian forest between the Kazhar Empire and Scandinavian War-bands. Again the "gentle" reaction postulated by Toynbee as a possible attitude for the external proletariat, manifested itself on the

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 288.

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one hand in the person of Attawulf and on the other in the ap-
pearance of Islam. It requires no extended argument to show that
the only common feature of these phenomena is their occurrence
outside the civilizations borders, a classification into which
the Kazhar Empire fit only with difficulty.

Toynbee's analysis of the range of endurable challenges
exhibits his inability to make qualitative distinctions. He
refutes the theory of the excessiveness of the Hellenic challenge,
by the success of the Teuton response after the Celtic disaster.
Similarly, Islam triumphantly met the challenge represented by
the Roman intrusion into the Syriac civilization despite the
abortive Jewish and Zoroastrian revolts. Yet it must be appar-
ent that the only connection between these challenges is supplied
by their Hellenic origin. The impact of Rome on the Celts oc-
curred at the height of Roman power, aided by the proximity of
the Po Valley to the center of its strength. It is at least de-
batable whether the Teutons could have successfully resisted the
Roman challenge had it been offered under comparable conditions.
The catastrophe of Judaism and Zoroastrianism also took place at
a much earlier stage in historical development. Moreover, Islam
hardly represented the response to a Roman stimulus. Yet Toyn-
bee's empiricism allows him to distinguish challenges only by
their origin and magnitude, not by their inner meaning.

1. Limitations of space prevent a multiplication of examples. Moreover, severe doubts are raised by the "gentle" response of some of the barbarian occupiers of Rome. Though undoubtedly there existed various degrees of severity this is very far from proving an innate gentleness.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. III. p. 274.

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Similarly, Toynbee considers standardization through disintegration demonstrated conclusively by the uniform appearance of a dominant minority, an internal proletariat and an external proletariat in declining civilizations. However, this proves merely an identity of outward form not of inward problem-ation. The same uniformity is found during growth which, according to Toynbee, always reveals a creative minority, an uninspired majority and barbarians under the civilization's spell.

The process of withdrawal and return by which the creative minority accomplishes its growth in stature reveals all the difficulties of Toynbee's pragmatism. Its proof rests in the first instance, on the life of Christ. Once postulated, the principle magically reveals itself in a vast variety of manifestations of creativity. Withdrawal and return as an agency of growth implies, however, that the increment in creative leadership bears some relation to the temporary cessation from activity and is given effect by a return to the world. Of Toynbee's illustrations only Christ, Saint Paul and other Christian figures met the test. Hindenburg was, to be sure, in retirement when placed in charge of Germany's Eastern Front in 1944. Yet absolutely no evidence exists, I believe, that his period of inactivity increased his military efficiency at Tannenberg, which derived from his intimate knowledge of his ancestral Mansurian lake-district. Then, unquestioningly was smuggled back to Russia by the Germans. It is only fair to assume, however, that Russia's military collapse was infinitely more instrumental in giving the Bolsheviks

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their opportunity in 1917, than the Swiss exile of their leader. Mohammed's withdrawal to Mecca, Machiavelli's exile from Florence, Kant's seclusion in Koenigsberg, the life of the Buddha, consti- tute phenomena without any inner connection. Withdrawal-and- return has become a technical classification of surface pheno- mena, a mechanistic description of definitional concepts.

The empirical method breaks down completely when applied to such concepts as progress and purpose, which must ever remain metaphysical constructions. Toynbee attempts, through a pyramid- ing of metaphors to make the transition from the biological to the theological realm. But analogies can not serve as substi- tutes for demonstration. They assume the proof and merely illus- trate the essential similarity of divergent manifestations. An empiricist, whose field of vision is restricted to a ledge and a precipice has no warranty for postulating a continuity of geo- logical strata. A pragmatist, who lets himself be instructed by his data can not assert that any vehicle will succeed in negotia- ting the exit of a one-way street, in the face of uniform dis- aster nor can he consistently claim that the break-downs are due to a "reversal in violation of the rules". In empirical terms if all automobiles have in fact reversed, that seems to be the rule. The loom of history may utilize the backward and forward movements of a shuttle to spin its design, but in subjective terms each downswing marks the end of a civilization and the pattern will not be apparent until the end of time. Progress

1. Machiavelli and Dante did not "return"; Kant neither "withered" nor "returned" but lived all his life in Koenigsberg. It might further be asked how withdrawal differs from the truancy which Toynbee condemns.

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and purpose represent the resolution of a soul, the rebellion
against transitoriness, the hope for permanence. No technical
manipulation of empirical data can wrest an assurance out of
phenomena, the final attainment of which man can only find within
1
himself.

Toynbee thought that he had transcended Spengler by an
assertion of purposiveness. Life presents a succession of prob-
lems, each a challenge to undergo an ordeal. Challenge-and-
response, the interaction of race and environment, the opportun-
ity presented by the Devil to God for further creative activity
reveal the mechanism by which freedom accomplishes itself in the
world. The prediction of historical events is impossible for
the reaction of the protagonist to the ordeal must remain the
unknown quantity.
2

Freedom, can not be proved syllogistically, however.
An inner experience, again, remains inaccessible to the empir-
ist. Toynbee's actual analysis defines the response exclusive-
ly in terms of challenge. This constitutes but a restatement
of the Environment theory. For, after all, no environmentalist
would claim - as Toynbee implies - that climatic or topograph-
ical conditions spontaneously produce civilizations in the manner

1. See post. Ch. "The Sense of Responsibility". Also Appendix A "The Concepts of Meaning".

2. Toynbee, op. cit. Vol. I. p. 302.

3. Toynbee's syllogism goes like this: A civilization is that which develops from a challenge. A challenge is that from which a civilization develops. This however, merely shifts the problem of definition from "development" to "challenge".

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of the Giants growing out of the earth. ¹ Toynbee's analysis of challenges involves the same difficulties of Spengler's postulate of historical necessity as a guide to action. ² For what constitutes a challenge? Toynbee replies that which produces a civilization. A challenge is proved excessive by a comparison in three terms, of which the middle term represents successful adaptation. The Golden Mean exhibits that challenge which evokes the most potently creative act. Yet Toynbee here defines these concepts syllogistically in terms of each other and explains not challenge, but the fact of survival. Just as the "pleasure principle", just as the "necessary" dictum, challenge-and-response assigns conceptual quantities to past action.

Challenge-and-Response to be meaningful as an assertion of purposiveness would have to examine the personal in the response, the unique in the reaction to the ordeal. But this is precisely what Toynbee's method does not permit. His empiricism implies that every event can only result from a commensurate causality defined as Challenge, classifiable as a phenomena subject to well-understood laws. This is illustrated by his survey of the genesis of civilizations, postulated as the consequence of the stimulus of hard countries. It becomes apparent, however, that among Toynbee's twenty-one civilizations all climates and all topographical conditions are represented. This indicates that it is not the challenge which structures the response, but the

¹ Toynbee utilizes the same misstatement to refute Spengler.

² See post Ch. "History as Intuition". (Conclusions).

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response which finds its challenge.

Freedom is not the nice balance of external factors which
will evoke the most suitable reaction but an inner state which
seeks its own stimulus. For what else can account for the de-
cline of the Easter-Islanders? They had conquered the sea, if
not with any margin of safety and achieved a considerable cultur-
al level. But then the ocean ceased to be traversed, and Easter
Island disappeared into an oblivion from which it re-emerged as
but a Colonial dependency in the nineteenth century. Yet what
happened? The severity of the sea did not change, the stimulus
of the environment did not lessen. But the capacity to exper-
lence the ocean as a challenge, the inner state that had utilized
the infinite as a foil did diminish and therein lay the doom of
Easter Island.

Toynbee recognized the purposive element, but the ambig-
uity of his method resulted in a definition of the operation of
necessity. Freedom, however, is not to be found in the appre-
dension of external relations. Nor will it develop from an en-
gineering into society of a maximum of alternatives. Freedom
depends less on the existence, than on the recognition of alter-
natives, not on a set of conditions, but an inward experience. 2

The assertion of pervasive purposiveness led Toynbee to
deny the existence of any organic factor in the development of

1. Toynbee Vol. III. p. 5.

2. See post Ch. "The Sense of Responsibility" for full development. Also Ch: "History and Man's Experience of Morality".

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civilizations. Societies do not represent organisms but the common field of activity of their members, the medium of communications of their constitutents. Their growth is accomplished by mimesis, a social drill, through which the Saints, as the apprehension of the new life, lead the uncreative majority on the roads towards increased etherealization. Breakdowns exhibit a failure of self-determination not an inexorable fatality. Sin constitutes the causality by which the nemesis of creativity accomplishes itself.

Yet again the mere postulation of freedom is not enough. Toynbee rejected the concept of a civilization's soul, but his empiricism merely issues in its definition. For what else is mimesis? Spengler, after all, had not used the word "soul" in a literal sense, but defined it as the "image of a counterworld, the mode of visualizing that which remains eternally alien to the physical eye". If social drill constitutes a generic feature of social life, if it exhibits those relations which require no formal institutions because of their self-evidence, then Toynbee has merely shifted the emphasis from the manifestations of the organic aspect to a description of its operation. How does mimesis differ from the beat of self-implementation by which Spengler's soul actualizes itself?

Toynbee ascribes the breakdown of civilizations to two contradictory factors, the nomisis of creativity and the mechanicalness of mimesis. This raises formidable difficulties in

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 300.

2. Indeed the choice of the word "generic" indicates an organic factor.

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logic. If mimesis results from the inability of the uninspired
majority to absorb directly the inspiration of the Saints, then
"chaos" of the leaders can not reside in their creativity. How
will the mass recognize the Saints? Indeed, their appearance is
itself an event of "such unimaginable rarity", that a social
drill, the efficacy of which must depend on a certain uniform-
ity, can hardly develop from so uncertain a phenomena. The
breakdown of mimesis moreover is a mechanical failure and bears
no relation to a deficient self-determination, Toynbee's usual
criterion for decline.

Again if the loss of inspiration by the creative minor-
ity accounts for society's disintegration and the secession of
the internal proletariat, by what standard is that deficiency
apprehended? If the uncreative majority possessed a criterion
for creativity, it would not require mimesis. If mimesis con-
stitutes the generic feature of social life, Toynbee can not
complain about its direction and his attempts to describe break-
down in terms of purposiveness fails.

Toynbee maintains that compulsion replaces charm as the
social bond in the early stages of breakdown. The philosopher
masked by a king is doomed to frustration for his efficiency
depends on the implied threat of force. Mimesis to be effective,
must, however, rely on this threat. Thus it appears that
society's breakdown is, after all, inevitable, its fatality

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. III. p. 272.

2. Toynbee specifically considers the reliance on mimesis as
dooming the philosopher masked by a King. Toynbee op. cit.
Vol. VI. p. 255.

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the function of the feature which distinguishes a civilization
from primitive societies.

Toymbee replaces the theory of the organic nature of
civilizations by the assertion that relations can possess no
soul. This will hardly be contested. Yet he has not shown that
civilizations represent no more than mere relations. His geo-
metric analogy demonstrates the appearance of such a relation
but not its existence. The question arises of what the civil-
ization constitute the common field activity? If they represent
the medium of communication of their component political commun-
ities, then the original difficulty reappears in different form.
For since the constituent societies are themselves merely rela-
tions, they manifestly can not exhibit dynamic fields. If, on
the other hand civilizations represent the totality of their
individual members, then the withdrawal-and-return by which Athens,
Italy and England grew in stature and the mimesis of the civil-
ization's creative minority remains to be explained.

Toymbee can, in fact, never escape these difficulties.
For since he leans to the conception of the civilization as the
common field of action of the component political communities,
he must perforce consider these units organic entities. This
forms the basis for the assertion that Athens played truant at
the crucial stage of Hellenic history. This, too, is implied

It also is implied by Toymbee's concept that the idolization
of an ephemeral self by Athens was so pervasive that the
Byzantine Empress of Athenian birth who was involved in
the iconoclastic controversy exhibited the same perversity
which once before had led the Athenians to reject Paul.

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by the concept of the Schism in the Soul. It can hardly be main-
tained that each individual of the disintegrating society exhibits
all these possible attitudes. The immanence of the organic fac-
tor constantly reappears. Toynbee rejects futurism and archaism,
their necessary futility deriving from an attempt to "arrest the
impetus of life which will not be denied". The inevitable ap-
pearance in twenty-one civilizations, of identical political or-
ganizations, at each stage of development indicates a pervasive
immanence, not to be evaded by defining its necessity as Sin.

The assertion of freedom stands revealed as the mechan-
ization of inexorability. The attempt to impose an empirical
method on noumenal reality could yield no other results. Differ-
entiation by growth sets the limits of development as necessarily
as Spengler's Destiny. For if each response automatically pro-
duces a new challenge, the range of possible reactions tend to
become ever narrower and thereby more determined. The concept
of society as a relation accentuates man's insignificance. "In
social life man's power to order their affairs on a rational plan
is narrowly restricted, since a society is not the chattel of
any one owner but is the common ground of many men's field of
action; and for this reason, a precept which is common sense in
the economy of the household, and practical wisdom in the life of
the spirit, is a counsel of perfection in social affairs". This
illustrates, any abstract exaltation of freedom to the contrary

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 97.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. IV. p. 132.

notwithstanding, the true implications of Toynbee's philosophy.
Freedom is not to be apprehended by way of historical law. Inner
experiences remain unsuited for a pragmatic method. Morality
does not reveal itself in maxims of prudent conduct.

Yet the biological approach necessarily leads to such
conclusions. In such a scheme survival exhibits the ultimate
test of inner fitness. Toynbee's criteria for ethical conduct
are found to be based on their practical utility; permanence con-
stitutes his ultimate test for historical endeavor. Immortality,
however, is not a data of history but an inward resolve. The
concept of evolution contradicts its attainability. An unfold-
ing of growth and decay has characterized all historical exist-
ence. Toynbee's reliance on transitoriness as a revelation of
inward failure defeats itself, for life implies mortality. No
stage of development, even in his terms, has lasted. Every civil-
ization has either collapsed or exhibits all the symptoms of
decline. Though the universal state precedes disintegration,
etherealization precedes the universal state, and birth ethereal-
ization. Can temporal succession contain the causality of history?
Is life the cause of death, or night of day?

Toynbee's causality recognizes no mysteries. It tends to
rest its assurance of immortality out of phenomena by conjuring
their appearance. Its tool is an assertive syllogism, that at-
tempts to read Divine purposes into historical events and submits

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even God to normative criticism. History exhibits unchanging laws, its rhythm apparent to the discerning, its morality success. Toynbee's approach to mythology illustrates the claims of a rationality that denies the existence of any reality outside of itself.

Fiction, Historical treatment and Natural science, represent qualitatively equivalent modes of apprehending an equally objective reality. Their suitability for the description of phenomena is determined by the quantity of data. Thus natural science with the manageability of its calculations formulates general laws, while the manifold possibilities of everyday existence allow but the presentation of representative types in the form of fiction. History, as the mean, has as its most applicable style the comparative study. This explains Toynbee's approach to the New Testament and Mythology. As representations of objective occurrences they contain not only analogies, but actual maxims derived from real events. Thus Eden represents a level of integration which through the intervention of the Devil is changed to the activity of Yang. Therefore, Sabbath proves the nemesis of creativity, when God in the perfection of the world found no further outlet for His activity. For this reason, Toynbee has to engage in extended argument to prove the essential "fairness" of God's wager with the devil. Love as the motive-force of the universe, must be a Divine attribute, for its absence would indicate a deficiency in God. Christianity

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 441 (Annex to IC)

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will be saved because God's nature has to exhibit at least the
1
same constancy as Man's.

Yet what is Toynbee really doing? This is the magic
attitude that wills to escape the transitoriness of its exist-
ence by claiming this desire as a pattern of objective reality.
Mythology becomes practical ethics, a comprehended mechanics,
the key to eternal happiness. God obeys well-understood laws,
of "fairness", of "constancy" and of "love". What does humil-
ity mean in such a context? Goethe said: "The noblest manifest-
tation of Mankind is shuddering awe". Toynbee, on the other hand,
views the world as a machine, capable of manipulation through a
technical knowledge of the levers Challenge-and-Response, With-
drawal-and-Return and Mimesis.

Mythology, however, describes an inner state, not an
objective condition. It represents man's attempt to apprehend
the fatedness of life and in that recognition of necessity to
transcend it. It expresses humanity's hope and not its actual-
ization, man's creative essence not the material conditions of
success.

In a world of determined phenomena distinguished by mort-
slity, man can give expression to his experience of directed
live only by keeping before himself certain goals, not dependent
on immediate success, as beacons to follow, or aims to attain.
When a sceptic suggests to Don Quixote that perhaps his famous
Lady Dulcinea del Tobose does not really exist, he is perfectly

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 321.

2. In Kant's description of the categorical imperative: "Good in 'Themselves'".

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willing to entertain this proposition. But at the same time he asserts that her material reality is much less significant than her exercise of spiritual guidance. She serves as the condition of his prowess, as the motive-force of his activity, as the symbol of that purity for which alone the dream of the Golden Age becomes worthwhile. Just as Dante's Beatrice lights the road in the pilgrim's most desperate moments, so humanity tells itself its aspirations in the quest for inward peace. For this reason-and not because of its correspondence to objective reality - is poetry truer than history for it describes that which man imparts to organic necessity, the essence of his moral personality. Every individual has his Dulcinea or Beatrice and becomes a Don Quixote in the hopes of his creativity. Only he must learn that the Golden Age is the state of a soul, not in the first instance to be derived from the physical world.

And so poetry testifies to fatality overcome, to the goal of our quest, the hope of our fulfillment, the infinite as certainty. The New Testament offers no causal proofs, nor prudent maxims. Its essence is Inward Tranquility, the humility that does not attempt to define the limits of mortality and is expressed by Piccardo Donati: "In His will in our Peace".

This, too, constitutes the true substance of freedom. It resides in an inward experience of life as a process of meaningful alternatives. The content of existence can not depend on social engineering or an apprehension of physical immortality.

1. Dante - Divine Comedy Paradise Canto 3.

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Man must act and each action represents his biography, none the
less irrevocable for being committed with a knowledge of tran-
sitoriness. Toynbee completely misunderstood the philosophical
ideal of Detachment. It does not reject love, but affirms -
in Kant - that Man's rationality allows the self-determination
to action out of a conception of the ultimacy of the moral per-
sonality, apart from any considerations of personal attachments.
In the nobility of this sentiment resides humanity's hope of
self-realization, the possibility of transcending the deter-
mined inexorability of phenomenal reality, the apprehension of
immortality, the inward recognition of limits-expressed as toler-
ance-before God.

Toynbee's philosophy of history represents a conscien-
tious and vast effort to resolve the dilemmas of existence. He
attempted to enlarge the area of human freedom by postulating
a pervasive purposiveness. His conflicting approaches make an
evaluation very difficult. The assertion of purposiveness is
negated by the conception of history as an evolutionary pattern,
in which survival constitutes the only test of inner fitness.
The theological basis results in imparting a divine sanction
into biological processes and leads to the Calvinistic implica-
tion of failure as a sign of Sin. At the end of the road stands
transfiguration, the recognition of the super-mundane plane of

1. Which Toynbee calls "repulsive".

2. See post "History& Man's Experience of Morality". Also Ch. "The Sense of Responsibility".

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reality, the apprehension of the kingdom of God.

Spengler had a vision of the world-as-experience but felt only the organic element. Toynbee saw in History a machine, but recognized theoretically the purposive factor. His failure, despite many brilliant empirical analysis, resulted from an attempt to look into the mere manifestations of history for a proof of their noumenal significance, from an effort to find a moral sanction in political events instead of within himself.

The problem of necessity and freedom remains unresolved. But a way has been pointed along which the two realms can be united. If freedom is not an attribute of external, objective reality, it must result from an inward state that imposes its patterns on phenomena. If morality is not denoted by successful activity, we must find better criteria for ethical conduct. The two realms of freedom and necessity are perhaps reconcilable through our experience of freedom in a however determined world. The meaning of history may appear, as the emanation of man's moral personality.

We have come up to the problem of History and Man's Experience of Morality.

Introduction (The Problem of Freedom & Necessity in the
Philosophies Preceding Kant).

Spengler had a vision of the world-as-experience but in-
stead of the uniqueness of events found the generality of phen-
omena. Toynbee had understood that man craves greater inward
certainty than a mere exhortation to do the necessary. Yet his
attempt to derive a sanction for moral action from an empirical
analysis of historical events was doomed to fail. What then is
the solution of our paradox? What is the import of freedom in
a world of determined phenomena? If the meaning of life can not
be derived as an attribute of reality, wherein does it reside?

Over a hundred years before Spengler and Toynbee, in
the provincial Prussian town of Koenigsberg, the problem of the
meaning of life, the paradox of our experience of freedom in a
world of causal laws received its profoundest formulation. Kant
was faced with the heritage of a philosophy which had reduced
freedom and morality either to the technical knowledge of ob-
jective necessity or to a mere catalogue of pleasing perceptions.
The opposition of Rationalism and Empiricism is analogous to
the conflict between Spengler and Toynbee. Spengler's dictum
that man's freedom consists of doing the necessary or doing
nothing, might have been uttered by Spinoza. Toynbee's im-
plication that survival embodies a mode of morality, corresponds
to Rume's concept of the pleasure induced by utility, of bene-
to violence as an inherent trait.

1. Though of course giving it a different content.

2. Since survival is an indication of utility. See post.

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But Kant refused to admit the validity of these asser-
tions. He affirmed that besides the realm of necessity, there
existed a realm of freedom as the repository of the meaning of
occurrences. In part a reaction to Empiricism and Rationalism,
in part their synthesis, Kant's philosophy transcended both in
reformulating the possibilities of human knowledge. And because
possibility implies the notion of limit, and since metaphysics
can be defined as tracing the boundaries of the knowable, Kant
achieved a resolution of our enigma of the antinomy of freedom
and necessity in which metaphysical paradoxes are solved though
not known by ethical postulates.

Kant limited knowledge to make room for belief. He main-
tained that the mind imposed certain forms on appearances as a
condition for its cognitive action. By analyzing these cate-
gories which structure all knowledge, he made phenomenal reality
the emanation of pure reason. But at the same time Kant asserted
that reality was not exhausted by its appearances, that pro-
founder levels of meaning existed, revealed to man in his es-
thetic, theological and, above all, moral experiences. The
transcendental intuition of freedom opens vistas of the noumena,
the things-in-themselves, which no causal analysis can ever
reach. The meaning given to life discloses a personality, whose
moral sanction does not reside in specific attributes such as
moderation or self-control but in the disposition of the will.
The merit of conduct depends on its conformity to a rule which

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Is not a law but a guide to action. Since nobody in the ultimate decisions of life can obtain a technical solution for moral dilemmas, but is forced to infuse his own spirituality into his problems, Kant's categorical imperative constitutes an affirmation of man's responsibility to give his specific meaning to his particular existence. This finds expression in the concept of a universally legislating will which serves as both subject and lawgiver in a kingdom of ends and allows a morality of universal applicability.

The categorical imperative provides the frame-work for Kant's philosophy of history. If the transcendental experience of freedom represents the condition for the apprehension of the greater truth at the core of all phenomenal appearances, then its maxims must constitute norms in the political field. Peace is therefore the noblest goal of human endeavor, the affirmation of the ultimacy of man's moral personality. The essay on Perpetual Peace contains an outline for the attainment of this task.

Kant's philosophy of history reflects his conception of peace as the final purpose of all human striving. Here, however, the magnificent symmetry of Kant's thought weakens. If his Idea for a Universal History implies that our moral duty for peace enables us to form a conception of its historical attainability, then the inner relationship with the Critiques of Pure

1. See post my discussion of Satre's and Schweitzer's Criticism of Kant.

2. See Friedrich concept that the problem of peace was the most central to Kant's thought - Inevitable Peace - The Philosophy of Kant.

["-263-", "Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason is maintained. Serious problems are raised, on the other hand, if Kant means that a hidden plan of nature inexorably compels humanity towards harmony with human volition but a tool of nature's mechanism. Necessity can never contain a sanction for moral action. Purposes-as the Critique of Pure Reason abundantly demonstrates - are not to be derived from phenomena. The Critique of Judgment illustrates that a conception of purposiveness in nature can be formed as the condition for mechanical law. Yet purposiveness does not mean a definition of purposes. Though a demonstration of its impossibility would vitiate the command of the categorical imperative for peace, this does not logically imply the necessity for proving inevitability. Moreover the possibility of the categorical imperative results from its very conception not from its relation to empirical reality. Theory and practice are united in the moral norm derived from a transcendental experience of freedom.", "Withal a road has been pointed towards the resolution of our enigma of man's freedom in a world of determined phenomena. The meaning of life has been seen to constitute the emanation of a personality not an attribute of reality. Morality derives its sanctions from the inward necessity of a universal", "1. For Kant's implication of inexorability see Friedrich "The Philosophy of Kant" p. 453 (Eternal Peace).", "2. See Friedrich op. cit. p. 458. (Essay on Eternal Peace). For full discussion see post \"Kants Philosophy of History\".", "3. See Bernard - Critique of Judgment p. 25. See post for full discussion also of psychological difference for proofs of 'impossibility' and 'possibility'."]

rule not from the objective necessity implied by a mode of survival. History - in one interpretation of Kant's essay - presents a challenge for the recognition of the ultimacy of the moral personality, expressed in the concept of peace and harmony as the goal of all strife, the purpose of all conflict.

The nature of Kant's philosophy can not be made intelligible without a discussion of the doctrines that preceded him. The 17th century witnessed the final disintegration of the two pillars of the medieval concepts of universality: the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. Under the impact of the Reformation, through the religious wars and settlements of the 16th century, the Catholic Church had split up and given birth to several Protestant sects. The Holy Roman Empire, growing steadily weaker ever since the collapse of the Hohenstauffen dynasty, rend violently by the Reformation, was ruined in everything but name by the Thirty Year's war. A new era was dawning in Europe, an era of absolute sovereignty, dynastic monarchy and nationalism.

This era needed philosophic justification. No longer were medieval doctrines of teleology, in which Man and the universe were understandable only through an end, interpreted by the Pope in Rome, sufficient. The tremendous spirit of scientific discoveries in the early 17th century gave rise to a belief in the feasibility of an inquiry into causes. Thus there arose

a new concept of Absoluteness, an Absolute determined,
by its essence and not by its end and moreover discoverable by
anybody by the mere application of the mathematical method to
metaphysical problems. The pilot of nature was no longer God
but Reason.

Descartes was the founder of modern philosophy, setting
the stage for later philosophical discussion. In his work "On
the Method" he laid down the following 4 rules for abstract spec-
ulation. (1) To accept nothing but what is self-evident. (2)
To resolve each problem into parts small enough to be individ-
ually examined. (3) To advance by a series of steps from self-
evident premise to certain deduction. (4) To linger on each
problem until all its possibilities are examined.

His central problem can be defined as an inquiry into
the very possibility of knowledge. What relation exists between
objective reality and our ideas about it? There is daily proof
of the fallibility of sense-impressions and the possibility exists
that some malignant demon might so warp the cognitive faculties
that a rational knowledge of reality becomes impossible. Des-
cartes escapes from this total solibism by first asserting that,
whatever the power of the deceiver, thought implies a thinking
substance and the reality of the "I" who thinks and doubts is
thereby assured. Moreover the intervention of an omnipotent God,
who by definition can not be a doceiver, guarantees the reality
of the physical world. The Cartesian dualism posits two finite
realms, thinking and extended both of objective reality, with

God, the Infinite Substance, as the middle ground and the assurance of certainty.

Descartes' attempt to attain knowledge through mere methodology raised many difficulties, however. God's existence was demonstrated by the very faculty the validity of which had been seriously brought into question. Moreover, if the Deity guarantees objective reality, Cogito ergo sum becomes a meaningless dialectic exercise. The trend of subsequent philosophical discussion was, however, established. Though Descartes main concern was not moral philosophy, his strongly implied that Virtue resulted from the right Knowledge of an objective reality.

The unsatisfactoriness of the Cartesian dualism led to two strands of thought each more consistent than Descartes, each utilizing one of Descartes' substances as the basis of its philosophy: the Spinozistic Pantheism and the British Empiricism. Spinoza opted for the God. He denied that different substances of thought and matter existed. The universe in all its manifestations merely reveals God as the unity of all nature and its immanent cause. Matter and Mind disclose, but attributes of the Divine, one viewed under the aspect of extension, the other as thought. In such a scheme the experience of freedom becomes the emanation of the Deity as the only source of all motivation. Causality in the Universe, purposiveness in events can never, for Spinoza, serve as an explanatory principle. There are no actions, only happenings. Everything occurs by inward necessity, expressed by conatus, the tendency to persevere in

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one's own being. Moral sanction attaches to actions that support this effort, no other connotation of good and evil can be conceived.

Virtue as the capacity for self-maintenance at the highest level is attained by man under the aegis of Reason which reveals God as the unity of all existence. The wise man will therefore realize that his advantage can best be served by surrounding himself with an atmosphere of peace, by repaying violence with kindness. An inner reconciliation ensues a realization that nothing divine deserves contempt, but equally, that sympathy is not required as a source of motivation. Acting with enlightened egoism, the sage masters the passions which testify to his existence in nature and attains the power of self-determination in the bliss of a resignation into God.

Virtue is thus attained by knowledge, by understanding the inexorability of events and by the correct evaluation of one's true advantage. The similarity to Spengler (and to Hobbes) is striking, however different their conclusions. Both agree that an inevitable necessity rules existence, for which causality constitutes a shallow and inadequate explanation. Both find the key to comprehension in an intuitive grasp of the immanence that produces all occurrences. Spinoza - just as Spengler - conceives the state as engaged in a fight for sheer survival

1. Friederich Nietzsche - Inevitable Peace - p. 149 et. seq. has characterized Spinoza as the logical philosophy of Calvinism.

2. Spinoza's solecriterion is inward certainty. See Essay on Human Understanding.

In which to keep promises on fancied moral grounds represents
the only real Sin. Freedom is the apprehension of an objective
necessity to which man imparts but little.

Yet the difficulties of a concept that required intui-
tive insight, backed merely by Reason were too great. An era
of new scientific discovery, particularly in physics, seemed to
demonstrate that the true source of knowledge was not the mind
but nature, indeed that the mind is instructed by nature. Locke,
founding the school of British Empiricists, conceived of the mind
as a blank tablet endowed with a wax-like capacity of receiving
sensuory impressions. Thus the other implication of Descartes
was developed, into an assertion of the primary of the physical
substance, into a rejection of any innate ideas.

Carried to its ultimate conclusion by Hume, this led to
a total metaphysical scepticism. Knowledge was based on exper-
ience, reasoning revealed the habitual expectation of recurrent
situations. Cause and effect constituted but the representation
of a constant conjunction of events, so that the appearance of
event A, leads to the anticipation of event B. Yet one can not
postulate a necessary connection between A and B. Space and time
merely exhibit the result of certain regularities or juxtaposi-
tions of empirical entities. Thus innate ideas were non-existent,
the concept of ultimate reality meaningless.

Hume's ethics reflect his metaphysical assumptions.

See post The Sense of Responsibility for implication of
Spinoza's concept of intellectual love of God which makes
this analysis provisional. The fact that Spinoza opted for
peace and Spengler for strife reveals their personalities but
is in no sense a logical necessity of their system. See post.

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Morality was based on a pleasing sensibility, the faculty of benevolence whereby humane impulses receive inward approbation. Social institutions depend in part on habit, in part on the pleasure derived from their utility. Thus morality became an attribute of external reality, - however conceived, pleasure the only source of motivation. The similarity in the conclusions of the empiricists Toynbee and Hume illustrates the effect of metaphysical assumptions. ¹ In each case survival is given moral sanction, conceived as an indication of utility by Hume, as an emanation of Divine grace by Toynbee. But where Hume's metaphysical scepticism shrinks from ascribing ultimate purposes to phenomena, Toynbee's theological convictions enable him to find a divine imprint in historical events.

Kant's dilemma then is but a restatement of our original paradox: What is the meaning of this necessity that accomplishes itself under the mode of freedom? The rationalists had asserted the supremacy of reason, limiting freedom to the recognition of objective necessity, conceiving manipulatory knowledge as the only ethical criterion. ² Their theory of knowledge was based on analytic a priori judgments, intuitively derived, which contained the whole truth within themselves and claimed their self evidence as the objective pattern of reality. Yet the attempt

¹ See post "Appendix A" The Concepts of Meaning.

² For a distinction between objective and subjective or inward necessity see post "The Sense of Responsibility".

³ Kant calls this a determinative judgment in his "Critique of Judgment."

to achieve certainty by an analysis of innate ideas was doomed
to failure, despite many great achievements of internal consis-
tency. The Rationalists were ever forced to abstract from the
uniqueness of experience in order to achieve the minimal forms
capable of intellectual manipulation. The problem of the ob-
jective existence of external reality and its relation to innate
ideas was in this formulation insolvable. The irony of the ration-
alist position is best expressed by their ultimate recourse to an
inward experience, subjective certainty, as the final criterion
of the validity of their judgments.

Empiricism, on the other hand, faced the dilemma that
despite the acuteness of its analysis of ordinary thought, its
judgments lacked the universality which forms the foundation of
profound ideation. To base cognition on mere experience is to
risk the overthrow of one's concepts with each new experience.
In the field of ethics, conduct could obtain sanction only through
a cataloguing of pleasing preceptions.

Kent was thus faced with the alternatives of freedom as
a function of a mechanistic naturalism or morality as an en-
lightened hedonism. How in a world obeying well-understood laws
of causality can reason give effect to the transcendental exper-
tence of freedom? What impact can moral maxims have on the un-
folding of political events? What is the relation of history to
man's experience of morality?

Kent decided that the problem was insoluble until the
boundaries of the realm of necessity and freedom were defined.

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He asserted that a mechanistic description of nature did not
preclude a conception of its transcendental immanence, to be
derived, however, as a datum of inward experience not as a
category of reason. He limited knowledge to make room for be-
lief. His political theory and consequent philosophy of history
represent an examination of his moral philosophy. Kant reconciled
the antinomy between necessity and freedom by way of an inward
state, a recognition of life as meaningful alternatives based on
an explicit limitation of mere rational analysis. Man can find
a sanction for conduct only within himself, not as an attribute
of external reality.

Kant's metaphysics, expressed in his Critique of Pure
reason, thus serve as the basis for an understanding of his
philosophy.

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Kant's Metaphysical Theory

Kant addressed himself to his central problem of the
implication of the transcendental experience of freedom by re-
examining the metaphysical presuppositions of both the ration-
alists and the empiricists. The rationalists had reduced free-
dom to a technical mastery of natural relations because their
analytic judgments a priori had made impossible recourse to ex-
perience. The empiricists had approached morality as a problem
of analyzing the pleasing perceptions of benevolence or utility
because their synthetic judgments a posteriori had denied the
possibility of universal validity. Yet experience without con-
cepts is blind, while concepts without precepts are meaningless.

Kant solved this dilemma by what he termed his Coper-
nican revolution. Perhaps the problem of how to achieve a rela-
tion between ideas and external reality, which had led Descartes
and Spinoza to invoke God as the connecting link, one in the
sense of guaranteed reliability and the other in the sense of
all-pervasiveness, and which, on the other hand, had forced Hume
into total scepticism, perhaps this problem was so intractable
because its basic epistemological assumptions were incorrectly
stated. Just as Copernican when he could not account for certain
physical phenomena on the assumption that the sun revolved around
the earth was finally forced to reverse this formulation, so
Kant restated the dilemma of how the mind which is abstract can

1. The Sense of Responsibility will discuss what is implied by
a transcendental experience.

conform to concrete external reality.

He revolutionized metaphysics by insisting that instead of the mind conforming to external reality, physical objects can only be understood if they conform to certain patterns and rules imposed by the mind. He emphasized, however, that reality in its entirety can never be comprehended. Man's knowledge extends only to phenomena in sensuous experience. Ultimate reality, the things-in-themselves, are not disclosed to the cognitive faculties. If this is true, then Critical philosophy by analyzing the essential structure of the thought processes can attempt a definition of the forms by which external reality is apprehended by pure reason and synthetic a priori judgment will be possible. These judgments state nothing less than that all phenomenal experience must conform to certain patterns for the constitution of the human mind prevents cognition in any other context.

The distinction of reality into phenomenal (apprehended by pure reason) and noumenal (things-in-themselves and as such the object of speculative reason) does not, however mean that knowledge of noumenal reality is impossible. Though pure reason is confined to phenomenal appearances, the noumena may reveal themselves to man by way of an inward experience. The realm of freedom appears as the transcendental condition of the realm of necessity. Thus Kant limits knowledge to achieve belief; thus he establishes the possibility of purposeful morality in a world of determined causality.

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The validity of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason depends on his analysis of the frame work within which phenomenal experience occurs. Time and Space, in this sense are not empirical entities nor properties of objects but patterns imposed by the mind on nature. Space is an absolute requirement to enable us to refer experiences to objects outside ourselves. The non-existence of space can not even be imagined, though space without objects to fill it is conceivable. Similarly, substance constitutes a category imposed by the mind to account for the possibility of change, for unless a permanence in some respects is postulated each modification would involve a new object.

Causality, again, reveals the condition which establishes the difference between objective and subjective cognition, between perception and imagination. When events occur in a certain order the mind attempts by an effort of will to reverse this sequence. If it fails the objective reality of the experience is assumed, its fitness for causal analysis established.

Kant thus transcended Hume's scepticism by limiting man's field of knowledge to the world of natural occurrences, forced into patterns by pure reason. He affirmed, however, that the phenomenal world may only represent an inadequate portion of a reality the further reaches of which can never be apprehended by pure reason, but the existence of which speculative reason

1. The following analysis is intended merely to indicate the general trend of Kant's argument. It is not meant to serve as an exhaustive discussion of the categories.

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1
allows and practical reason postulates.

The Critique of Pure Reason ends with a series of anti-
nomies relating to the finite and infinite, to freedom and God
versus causality. How can one speak of human freedom in a
world of causal necessity? How is it possible to speak of God
as a first cause, in the face of phenomena which require an
antecedent cause for every other? Kant resolves this basic
dilemma of existence by invoking his earlier distinction be-
tween phenomenal and noumenal reality. If the total reality is
expressed in the phenomenal world then indeed human freedom is
meaningless and God as a first cause a logical inconsistency.
If, on the other hand, there exists a noumenal reality beyond
the phenomenal manifestations, then insofar as man is noumenal
(a thing in itself) he may indeed achieve freedom, though as a
physical phenomena he remains subject to phenomenal requirements.

Pure reason can go no further than making room in its
metaphysical scheme for the ultimate reality which may reveal
itself to man in his theological, esthetic and moral experiences.
On the other hand, pure reason can show the weakness in the as-
sumptions of both the Rationalists and the Empiricists. If phen-
omenal reality does not exhaust the totality of man's experiences,
freedom can not be derived from a recognition of naturalistic
necessity. If senseous experience is confined to the appear-
ances of a profounder level of existence, the empirical world

1. See post for Kant's explanation of the noumenal reality.

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can not contain a moral sanction. The experience of freedom in
a determined environment is seen to be potentially meaningful
after all. The meaning of life becomes the emanation of a per-
sonality not an attribute of the empirical world. Purposive-
ness is not revealed by phenomenal reality but constitutes the
resolve of a soul. Freedom does have a place in a determined
universe.

The rigorousness and symmetry of Kant's method can not
be over-emphasized. No other philosopher had a clearer grasp
of the implications of our experience of freedom in a world of
causality. He fully recognized the importance of a profound
metaphysics for the apprehension of a total reality, which was
not however exhausted by the categories of pure reason. Kant's
metaphysics which have traced the boundaries of human knowledge
and at the same time opened vistas of an ultimate experience,
serve as the condition for the apprehension of a morality that
gives the profoundest expression to the intrinsic worth of the
moral personality, the transcendental experience which connects
Man with the Infinite.

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Moral Philosophy

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing awe and admiration, the more frequently and continuously reflection is occupied with them; the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me. I ought not to seek either outside my field of vision as though they were either shrouded in obscurity or visionary. I see them confronting me and link them immediately with the consciousness of my existence. The first (the starry heaven) begins with the place I occupy in the external world of sense and expands the connection in which I find myself in the incalculable vastness of worlds upon worlds, systems within systems over endless ages of periodic motion, their beginnings and perpetuations. The second (the moral law) starts from my invisible self, my moral personality and depicts me in a world of true infinitude which can be sensed only by the intellect. With this I recognize myself to be in a necessary and general connection not just accidentally as appears to be the case with the physical world. Through this recognition I also see myself linked to all visible worlds. The first view of a numberless quantity of worlds destroys my importance, since I am an animal-like being who must return to its matter from whence it came to the planet (a mere speck in the universe)..... The second view raises my value infinitely as an intelligence, through my personality; for in this personality the moral law reveals a life independent on animality and even of the entire world of sense. This is true at least as far as one can infer

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from the purposeful determination of my existence according
to this law. This is not restricted to the conditions of life
but radiates into the infinite."

Kant's ethics derive from the transcendental experience
of the moral law, from a vision of the numinal reality which
constitutes the real essence of appearances. Freedom is an
inward state which elevates humanity out of the world of necess-
ity into the realm where man in Dostojevski's words "perceives
the divine mystery of things". But what is the nature of the
moral law? How can any content and universality be ascribed
to it in the face of the intensely personal experience of free-
dom? Is morality expressed by conformity to explicit regula-
tions, or by an inward state that gives meaning to its own
maxims?

As in his Critique of Pure Reason Kant rejects the views
of both the Rationalists and the Empiricists. Objective necess-
ity, naturalistically conceived, can not constitute the essence
of morality for that would deny the direct experience of free-
dom. Ethical hedonism is inadequate because it prevents the
formulation of a universal rule. The happiness postulated by
hedonism and the feeling of benevolence of Hume multiply motiva-
tions but suffer from the same defects as synthetic a posteriori
judgments. The Epicurian concept of higher (mental) and lower

1. Kant - Critique of Practical Reason - Friedrich - The Philosophy of Kant p. 261.
2. For a discussion of the nature of this experience see post "The Sense of Responsibility". See ante - Introduction for brief discussion of Dostojevski.

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(physical) pleasures is meaningless in such a context. Intensity, not order, of enjoyment can serve as the only logical criterion for hedonism.

If neither rationalism nor empiricism provide a foundation for a universal law, how can humanity give effect to its experience of morality? Kant finds the answer in the very constitution of man. If everything in nature is created with a maximum of economy and the means chosen most apt, then happiness conceived as desire-satisfaction can not represent the purpose of a rational being. Instinct would suffice for the achievement of pleasure in the hedonistic sense. But man is endowed with reason and above all a practical reason that issues forth into action, and seemingly multiplies motivations. The faculty of rationality must consequently be designed to implement the moral experience.

But how can a personal experience contain a universal obligation? Just as the metaphysical dilemma was resolved only with the aid of synthetic a priori judgments, so Kant gives effect to man's experience of freedom by a priori principles that determine the will by their own inner necessity. Moral sanction consequently does not attach to such laudable qualities as moderation, self-control, or calm deliberation for in villains those very qualities tend to accentuate evil. The merit of conduct is determined solely by the disposition of a will which

1. This teleological concept depends on Kant's Critique of Judgment. See post.

acts out of a concept of duty expressed as respect for the moral law. This precludes inclination as a guide to action but prevents equally the definition of morality as a technical knowledge of naturalistic relations.

How then is the will determined by reason? In a holy will which acts of necessity according to the moral law such a determination is unnecessary. The human will, however, torn by desires, requires an imperative, a representation of a ground of action expressed by the word 'ought'. It is a hypothetical imperative if represented as a means to an end, a categorical imperative if an end in itself. But the moral law stems from a transcendental experience from a recognition of an ultimate reality beyond phenomenal appearances. It can therefore be implemented only by the categorical imperative, the maxims of which assure universality.

Kant's first formulation of the categorical imperative derives from the conception of the moral law determining the will by its own inward necessity from a priori principles. It states: "Act as if the maxims of thy action could become by thy will, universal laws of nature." Morality in this sense results from a point of view which recognizes that by its actions it gives maxims of universal applicability. The difference between morality and expediency, between inward compulsion of duty and inclination becomes immediately apparent. Kant cites the example of borrowing with the knowledge that its repayment is impossible. Whatever the expediency of this action it is

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1. Impossible to will it as a universal law of nature. The key to an immoral action resides in the willingness to make an exception in favor of inclination to a moral law recognized as of universal validity.

Kant's second formulation relies on the distinction between the categorical imperative as an end in itself and the hypothetical imperative in which the motivation is but a means. "So act, as to treat humanity whether in your own person or in that of others as an end only and never as a means". This concept expresses the recognition of the ultimacy of man's moral personality, the apprehension of tolerance which sets limits to one's activity out of respect for the divine in humanity. Its goal is the kingdom of ends in which the autonomy of the wills precludes any personal inclination in the carrying out of moral laws. Here every man is both legislator of universal maxims and subject to the rules created by the autonomy of others. Here the dignity of man, flowing from an awareness of his responsibility to mankind, provides the foundation for a heteronomy of wills in whom the transcendental vision of freedom has kindled the spark that has led to the common experience of the moral law.

But how can the categorical imperative furnish a conception of its possibility? If man forms part of nature - as all experience indicates - he is ruled by causality. This raises

1. For the discussion of this argument see post. It is not, of course, impossible to will this, but it is impossible to secure a reciprocal recognition of this volition.

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a series of other antinomies. Man attempts to achieve morality, yet the goal is distant and intuitively one feels the impossibility of its attainment. Man longs for the Summum Bonum - happiness commensurate with virtue, but no guarantee for a necessary connection exists in the phenomenal world. Duty seems the only motive that can guide humanity in its quest for morality.

Again Kant returns to the distinction in the Critique of Pure Reason between the noumenal and the phenomenal world. In so far as man participates in the realm of necessity - as a phenomena - he is indeed determined. But morality does not describe an order of nature, but has its origins in a mystic attitude within us. 1

Ethics testify to an experience which raises man above himself out of the world of senses, into the noumenal reality of the Divine design. Freedom the possibility of which speculative reason asserted is now postulated by practical reason. The striving for perfection induced by the moral law implies immortality to give effect to an endeavor impossible of fulfillment in a finite time. God appears as the guarantor of the Summum Bonum. 2

The postulates of God, Freedom and Immortality represent an assertion of the pervasiveness of man's moral experience. The transcendental experience of freedom overcomes all obstacles offered by the empirical realm. Theory and practice are united in the categorical imperative, the possibility of whose implementation derives from its very conception. 3

1. For interpretation of this attitude see post "The Sense of Responsibility".

2. N. Kemp. Smith - A Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason p. 608 points out that in later life Kant considered this an overly theoretical proof of God's existence and asserted instead that God speaks directly through the categorical imperative.

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Through his moral experience - not through any analysis of empirical reality - man attains a vision of a higher world-order and of the meaning of occurrences.

This enables Kant to redefine Christianity on the basis of a transcendental intuition without attempting - like Toynbee - to claim the sanction of external reality for this effort. The moral law is holy and presupposes a will directly determined by its commands. Yet all man can achieve in this life is a right-ful disposition arising out of respect for the law. The yearn-ing for the bliss of holiness therefore postulates eternity. The order of nature can offer no happiness as an inducement for the performance of the moral law. But the Christian concept of the Kingdom of God opens vistas of a profounder plane, in which ter-restial striving dissolves in the blessedness of inward peace. In the same sense Kant understands the biblical command of loving God and of loving one's neighbor as oneself. Pathological love can not be commanded. But a feeling of respect for the exper-ience of the moral law, a liking to do one's duty based on an a-priori conception expressed in the categorical imperative, an approach to man as an end, these constitute the true meaning of ethical love.

Kant has come full cycle. His Critique of Pure Reason by establishing the limits of knowledge, by the distinction be-tween phenomenal and noumenal reality left room for a significant

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moral experience. The transcendental experience of freedom gave meaning to the concept of a will determined to action by a priori considerations. The kingdom of ends emerged and an affirmation of man's dignity as the goal of ethical activity.

The rationalistic formulation of Kant's ethical philosophy tends to obscure its profound visions. Morality is found to reside in a mystic relationship to a supersensuous world-order, in a transcendental experience which alone makes the categorical imperative possible. For the necessity of the categorical imperative applies only to a specific attitude, its universality presupposes the prior experience of the moral law. This must be kept in mind in considering the criticism of Kant's ethics by Schweitzer and Satre. Though they differ in their point-of-view their arguments are remarkably alike. Schweitzer maintains that the validity of ethics issues from the necessity attending their thought. Kant's moral philosophy achieves universality at the cost of vitality, according to Schweitzer.

The content of the categorical imperative becomes so vague as to lose all meaning.

2

Satire restates this argument in practical terms. He cites the case of a young Frenchman torn between the desire of joining De Gaulle's forces and thereby exposing his mother to possible German retaliation or staying and losing his self-respect. Kant's categorical imperative offers no solution to

1. Schweitzer - The Philosophy of Civilization p. 182 et seq.

2. Satre - Existentialism p. 28 et seq.

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this dilemma according to Satre. Whatever the lad's decision,
he would treat somebody, either himself or his mother as but a
means.

Despite the impreciseness of the example it illustrates
well the confusion involved in this interpretation of Kant's
moral philosophy. Both Schweitzer and Satre argue as if moral
philosophy should be a manual of action supplying technical sol-
utions to all the problems of existence. But the dilemmas of
life are not to be reconciled by manipulation. Ethical conduct
to be meaningful must reveal a personality, not a mastery of
causal connections. Kant understood this and based his whole
moral philosophy on a transcendental experience. This implies,
however, that the categorical imperative can give conditions
only to a prior moral experience. Its universality expresses
a feeling of responsibility towards humanity, its obligation
testifies to a vision of an ultimate reality.

The existentialists are right in their assertion that
life involves action. But their demand that philosophy should
offer absolute certainty tends to deny the uniqueness of the
individual. The experience of freedom in a determined world
implies that we can transcend necessity only by imparting our
individuality to the inexorable unfolding of events. The exist-
entialists emphasis on activity, however, reduces man to an atom,
buffeted by fate, doomed to whirl in concentric circles until
a stable constellation is achieved through an understanding of
causal laws. But this confuses a physical state with an ethical

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norm. Similarly, Schweitzer wants ethics to be a necessity of thought. This too expresses a quest for certainty in an uncertain world, a claim to wrest out of intellectual constructions an immortality which the experience of directedness denies. A necessity of thought can not occur in a vacuum. The moral experience, again, reveals a task, not an inevitable development.

The young Frenchman's dilemma therefore was an aspect of the fatedness of existence not a refutation of the categorical imperative. No other person can ever feel the soul's dilemma in the ultimate crisis of life. Man must solve his problems with dignity, but alone. The categorical imperative can guide an attitude only if preceded by a transcendental experience of freedom. But experiences are personal and no outside can possibly prescribe their content. Love is unique only to the lover. Philosophy can therefore never create an ethical system which constitutes a necessity of thought or provides technical solutions for all of life's problems. It is humanity's responsibility to give its own meaning to its own existence.

The motive-force for this activity issues in the first instance from an inward experience which teaches man his limits and his intrinsic worth. This is the ultimate basis of human freedom, the condition for mankind's self-transcendence.

The transcendental experience of freedom serves as the foundation of Kant's moral philosophy; the categorical imperative

1. See post. "The Sense of Responsibility".

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provides the solution to the problem of reconciling universal applicability with personal experience. But Schweitzer offers another fundamental criticism. The union of ethical and epistemological idealism in Kant, implies - according to Schweitzer - that the noumenal reality which reveals itself as the moral law in man, operates as the objective principle in the physical world as well. If the phenomenal world discloses but the manifestation of a transcendental reality then the events brought about by causation are merely parallel appearances of occurrences which the intellect produces under the conception of freedom. Freedom and ethics thus become but a mode of necessity; an immanence rules all happenings, only the apprehension of which differs, but not its operation.

This is a profound analysis, though not a necessary one. The causality of the physical world represents a mode of apprehending phenomena, not a property of their occurrence. The experience of freedom constitutes man's intuition of an ultimate world-order. But this does not mean that this transcendence is in fact the objective representation of the operation of numerical reality. On the contrary if numerical reality is approachable only by an inward experience, the mode of its operation in the physical world must, of necessity, remain undecided.

Nevertheless, the tendency to equate man's experience of the moral law with the objective meaning of occurrences and thereby attributing an ethical sanction to phenomenal manifestations.

1. Schweitzer op. cit. p. 186 et seq.

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exists in Kant. It comes to expression in his philosophy of history, in which the duty to work for peace appears first as an emanation of the categorical imperative, only to stand revealed as the objective principle governing historical events.

The next section will deal with the problems raised by such a conception, and by the attempt to equate History with man's experience of morality.

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The Philosophy of History - Derived from the Categorical Imperative

Just as Kant's metaphysical theory had given meaning to
the transcendental experience of freedom, so his categorical
imperative determines man's political duties. "Morals when
conceived as the totality of absolutely binding laws according
to which we ought to act is in itself practice in the objective
sense. It is therefore a paradox to say that one can not do
(what one ought to do) once the authoritativeness of this con-
cept of duty is acknowledged." With this assertion of the ab-
solute pervasiveness of the moral law begins the Appendix to
Kant's Essay on Eternal Peace. No conflict can exist between
theory and practice in the political realm any more than in the
moral. The categorical imperative applies to all activity, in
2
every field, its possibility postulated by its very conception.

But what is the nature of the duty which the categorical
imperative commands from a priori considerations? Kant finds
the answer in the second formulation of the categorical impera-
tive, that man must always be treated as an end, never as a
means. In the domestic field this implies the creation of a
republican constitution, in which the categorical imperative is
institutionalized in a General will. In relations between states
this makes the attainment of eternal peace the statesman's noblest
duty.
3

1. Kant (Eternal Peace) Friedrich - The Philosophy of Kant, p.454.

2. Friedrich - Inevitable Peace p. 53 offers a different interpretation. For my discussion see post.

3. For Kant's criteria of a republican constitution see post.

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What validity can be ascribed to a duty, which seems negated by all experience? The practical man will be ready to point out that the moral law rarely coincides with the volition for its performance. Yet empirical reality can never supply a criterion for motivated activity in Kant's scheme. If man denies his transcendental experience of freedom then indeed public law is meaningless and eternal peace a chimera. If on the other hand, the moral law constitutes man's connecting link with noumenal reality then the realm of necessity appears as but a manifestation of the realm of freedom and opposition can occur between Theory and Practice.

The Empiricist - according to Kant - is ever forced to equate empirical reality with morality. The political moralist who adapts his maxims to phenomenal appearances imputes his notion of practical wisdom to the Divine. The moral politician on the other hand for whom the categorical imperative represents an absolute norm, realizes that the lawful organization of government implies a coincidence of the moral attitude in all particular wills. Though the weight of tradition may preclude an immediate modification of institutions the moral law ever guides his quest, a beacon to follow, an aim to attain. The political moralist knows men, but the moral politician understands Man, in the dignity of whose personality resides the only possibility of conceiving a duty, the sole guide to moral action.

Thus politics becomes a task of giving effect to man's

1. Kant - Eternal Peace - Friedrich op. cit. p. 469.

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transcendental vision of the numina which underlie all visible
workings. The categorical imperative emerges as the norm of
all political endeavor, to light the road towards the achieve-
ment of a republican constitution and the attainment of eternal
peace. The meaning of history results from an inward appro-
hension, that determines the will by its very conception with-
out any regard to its immediate empirical attainability. Peace
represents the goal of all human striving, the fulfillment of
the purpose of history.

Kant's Essay on Eternal Peace comprises nine articles
for a hypothetical treaty among nations for the assurance of
universal peace. The first six - the preliminary articles -
are frankly remedial, directed at specific abuses in contempor-
ary diplomacy. Though addressed to technical problems, their
obligation derives in each case from the a priori conception of
the moral law. They are:

1. "No treaty of peace shall be held such with the secret reservation of the material for a future war".

2. "No state having an independent existence whether it be small or great may be acquired by another state through inheritance, exchange, purchase or gift".

3. "Standing armies shall gradually disappear".

4. "No debt shall be contracted in connection with the foreign affairs of the state".