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TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
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40toynbe
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<text>
<title>
(1940s) Arnold Toynbee
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1940s Highlights
PEOPLE
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
Arnold Toynbee
</hdr>
<body>
<p>(March 17, 1947)
</p>
<p> A Study of History is dominated by an image of genius. The
view is of the chasm of precipitous time. On its sheer rock
walls, as the eye of the spectator adjusts itself to the somber
light of human history, are seen the bodies of climbers. Some,
prone and inert, lie on the ledges to which they have hurtled
to death. Some dangle, arrested, over the void as they cling by
their fingernails to cliffs too steep for their exhausted
strength to scale. Above these, a few still strain upward in a
convulsive effort to attain a height hidden from them as well
as from the spectator.
</p>
<p> These agonists are the personifications of the human societies
we call civilizations, in their upward impulse from the pit of
primitive times. Downward, beyond the extreme range of vision,
plunges a depth measured by 300,000 unenlightened years--the
time required for the lowest climber to reach, from primitive
to civilized man, the lowest visible ledge. The others have been
climbing, at one stage or another, for the 6,000 years of
discernible history.
</p>
<p> Of the myriads who may have attempted the ascent, Professor
Arnold Toynbee distinguishes 26 civilizations. Of these there
are only five active survivors: 1) Western civilization (Western
Europe, the British Commonwealth, the U.S., Latin America); 2)
Orthodox Christian civilization (Russia and the Orthodox
sections of southeastern Europe); 3) Islamic civilization; 4)
Hindu civilization; 5) Far Eastern civilization (China, Korea,
Japan). Of these five, four show signs of imminent exhaustion,
and the fifth, Western civilization, is breathing heavily.
</p>
<p> Those dangling, immobile, from the cliffs are the Eskimos,
the Polynesians, the Nomads--the arrested civilizations. Among
the debris on the ledges are the bodies of the Sumeric,
Babylonic, Egyptiac, Hellenic, Mexic and eleven other extinct
societies. This is the image; and its evocation of the
"infinitely multiple ordeal of man" is made bearable by
Professor Toynbee's unifying insistence: history is not
predetermined. Man may still choose to climb or not to climb.</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>