and respect for the depth of his understanding to wish to challenge him on these grounds. All I mean to say is that, to one whose primary historical interest lies in East Asia, it seems very evident that Toynbee’s theories were not derived from his knowledge of the history of that part of the world. They are obviously based on his very much deeper knowledge of the Mediterranean world and have only been applied in a somewhat superficial manner to East Asia.
We can hardly blame Toynbee for having approached the problem in this sequence. The material available to him on East Asian history, particularly in the languages he commands, is much less adequate than the material on Western history. At the same time, I suspect that his approach also derives at least in part from an unconscious assumption that Western history is somehow the human norm and that therefore any pattern that emerges clearly in the West must have universal validity. If he had actually assumed that East Asian historical experience is basically as significant as that of the West, he might have seen in his own presentation a very significant fact which he apparently overlooked but which stands out quite clearly to my more Asia-oriented eyes.
The basic theories of Toynbee seem to me to derive from the classic Western sequence of Greece and Rome, as do so many of the historical theories of the West, especially those that use the biological analogy of the birth, growth, mature hardening, and eventual decay of civilizations. These theories fit the ancient Chinese record smoothly, easily, and usually quite convincingly. The parallels between the contemporaneous sequences of Greece and Rome in the West and Chou and Han in China are quite striking. In fact, the pattern fits ancient China very much better than it does the post-classic West. The pattern fits the medieval and modern West only very loosely at best, and, when Toynbee tries to fasten it on post-classic China and Japan, the attempt begins to degenerate into absurdities.
I am tempted to conclude that the search for meaningful uniformities in history is more successful when pursued horizontally rather than vertically. That is, significant parallels in history are more likely to occur between cultures existing at the same general technological level (as for example between Rome and the Han Empire) than between cultures of different technological levels, even though they share common geographic and racial foundations.
Such a concept, if shown to have some validity, might prove much more helpful to Asians today than the sweeping generalizations, unlimited by time or space, that Marx and Toynbee have devised. It would help Asians to realize where they should look
