The first three volumes of A Study of History appeared in 1934; the last four are not yet two years old. During the interim the work of Arnold Toynbee has been widely disseminated, thanks to the abridged edition prepared by D. C. Somervell in 1946. Vigorously attacked by historians as soon as it appeared, the work continued to evoke their serious reservations. Some concentrated their efforts on pointing out multiple errors of chronology, fact, emphasis and interpretations: others, attacking the very inspiration or magnitude of the endeavor, judged it to be presumptuous and vain, foredoomed to failure, and all in all more the product of an outmoded concept of the philosophy of history than of proven methods of historical research.

Since 1927 I have been writing this book, A Study of History, side by side with the Chatham House Survey of International Affairs that my wife and I began to write in 1924.1 could not, I believe, have done either piece of work if I had not been doing the other at the same time. A survey of current affairs on a world-wide scale can be made only against a background of world-history; and a study of world-history would have no life in it if it left out the history of the writer's own lifetime, for one's contemporaries are the only people whom one can ever catch alive. An historian in our generation must study Gandhi and Lenin and Atatürk and F. D. Roosevelt if he is to have any hope of bringing Hammurabi and Ikhnaton and Amos and the Buddha back to life for himself and for his readers.

Twenty years after the first three volumes of Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History, the final four volumes have appeared: ten volumes in all, not counting two books still to come, a volume of Maps and Charts, and a book of Reconsiderations. Perhaps no work so comprehensive as this has appeared since the publication of Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy. The fact that the latter books dealt with the transformations of nature, while Toynbee's work becomes, through its own inner evolution, a study of the transfigurations of the human soul, tells much about the century that has passed and the present crisis.

At first glance it may seem paradoxical that a historian as resolutely idealist, in almost every sense of the word, as Arnold J. Toynbee, could be accused by some of his critics of replacing historical method by that of the natural sciences. This charge has been made, however, and upon reflection we realize that, rather than being overcome with astonishment, we must seek to explain the charge and, if possible, to justify Toynbee's method.

The search for more general truths in international relations leads to an examination of the basic forces that shape the conduct of foreign relations. This has been a major preoccupation of the new study of international relations. Scholarly observers holding up a mirror to international society note certain common features, some going back to the Greeks, others to the Treaty of Westphalia, others to the French Revolution, and still others to the Industrial Revolution. Some theorists identify a few elemental facts or “laws” of politics whose recurrence spans all historical eras: for example, Thucydides, Hobbes, the Federalists, and contemporary political realists speak with one voice about the stubborn reality of the balance of power. Underlying present-day international relations, however, the basic forces which give content to international behavior are for the most part the product of modern history. Nationalism and industrialization are new-fangled ideas which had to await fundamental social and economic changes. For Arnold Toynbee the fundamental forces of modern international relations are westernization, contemporary nationalism, and the rise of masses. The clue may be found in this triad to much of the bewilderingly complex and rapidly changing movement of international events. Any effort to understand Toynbee's approach to world politics must comprehend these elements in his thinking. With the publication of the last four volumes of his major work, we are able to view for the first time the full canvas on which he has traced their influence.

India has furnished the work of the English historian with a relatively large number of its elements. Without a doubt there is in this domain no material comparable in density and in erudite development to the excursus on the Achaemenian Empire which fills pages 580-689 of Volume VII of A Study of History. But there are enough passages, both long and short, to enable the reader fully to discern the author's reaction to this civilization. Where, indeed, would he have found so many motivated changes, so many external stimuli and internal absorptions, coupled with such continuity in time and in human habitation, to illustrate the general theses of his work?

Some of us may still remember the time when the ancient civilizations— the Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, and Chinese—were considered as isolated phenomena and as products of completely independent developments. It was only for later periods that influences from outside were conceded to a certain, rather limited, extent, such as those of the Near East in Greece, of Hellenism in India, or of the nomad peoples in China. In general, specialists looked but rarely beyond the invisible walls with which they had surrounded their domains. There were even those who resented any allusion to the possibility that foreign influence might have contributed to the formation of their favorite civilization. A few bold scholars had already attempted to trace cultural diffusion across wider expanses, to prove, for instance, that Chinese civilization was derived directly from that of Babylonia. But these premature and rather naïve attempts, based on entirely insufficient data, were only apt to discourage any too daring comparison.

Confucian humanist thought takes as its pivot human life, both in its spirituality and in its love for everything that is. It consists in the perfecting of self and of everything existent, always following the laws of life, in order to arrive, through beneficent knowledge, at perfect union. Since it contemplates man in his relationship with other men, with Heaven, with everything that is, from the vantage points of economics, politics, society, morality, virtue, arts and letters, philosophy, in order to attain the diverse degrees of natural knowledge, there is nothing that it cannot encompass within itself. The general structure of the whole of Confucian humanist thought tends to the traditional objective, which consists in the benevolent appraisal of the aspirations of people in conformity with the creative principle that the heavens embrace everything and that everything emanates from their generously protective climate.

Words, like human beings, embody avatars. Their meaning is transformed, expanding or contracting under multiple influences; in the end it is the collective will that always triumphs despite the resistance of elites or of schools. Such was the fate of the word which originally denoted the science of man in his totality and in his complexity: the word “anthropology·”