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The Cliffhangers. 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.
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.
Of the myriads who may have attempted the ascent, Professor 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.
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.
How, then, did these climbers come to be upon the cliffs at all? Why do these men suffer this millennial death by inches? Toynbee's answer to the problem of causation is illumined by a daring dialectic. "The play," he says, "opens with a perfect state of Yin [the Sinic term for the state of perfect passivity opposed to which is Yang, the state of ordeal and creativity]."
God, in short, is bound to passivity by the perfection of what He has created. Further progress is impossible. Says Toynbee: ". . . The impulse or motive which makes a perfect Yin-state pass over into a new Yang-activity comes from an intrusion of the Devil into the universe of God. . . .