THE CIVILIZATIONS OF MAN 87 



ganisms. They are quite earnest about the idea, readily ig- 

 noring the biological evidence to the contrary. Oswald 

 Spengler, the historian, writes: 



A civilization (Kultur) is born at the moment when, out of the 

 primitive psychic conditions of a perpetually infantile (raw) hu- 

 manity, a mighty soul awakes and extricates itself; a form out of 

 the formless, a bounded and transitory existence out of the bound- 

 less and persistent. This soul comes to flower on the soil of a 

 country with precise boundaries, to which it remains attached like 

 a plant. Conversely a civilization dies if once this soul has realized 

 the complete sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, lan- 

 guages, creeds, arts, states and sciences, and thereupon goes back 

 into the primitive psyche from which it originally emerged.* 



Arnold J. Toynbee in his A Study of History rejected 

 this point of view and based his whole analysis of growth in 

 man's societies on the assumption that creative individuals 

 and mass imitation were the sources of action in a society, a 

 truth he had found forcibly stated by Bergson: 



"We do not believe in the 'unconscious' [factor] in history: 

 'the great subterranean currents of thought,' of which there has 

 been so much talk, only flow in consequence of the fact that masses 

 of men have been carried away by one or more of their own num- 

 ber. ... It is useless to maintain that social progress takes place of 

 itself, bit by bit, in virtue of the spiritual condition of the society 

 at a certain period of its history. It is really a leap forward which 

 is only taken when the society has made up its mind to try an ex- 

 periment; this means that the sociey must have allowed itself to be 

 convinced, or at any rate allowed itself to be shaken; and the 

 shake is always given by somebody."t 



* Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. G. F. Atkinson 

 (2 vols.; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), I, 153. 



t Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Volumes 

 I-VI by D. C. Somervill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 

 pp. 211-12. This quotation is Toynbee's translation of material from 

 Henri Bergson, Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion (48th 

 ed.; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1946), pp. 333, 373. See also 

 Henri L. Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality a?2d Religion, trans. 

 R. Ashley Audra, Cloudesley Brereton, with assistance of W. H. Carter 

 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1935). 



