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Toynbee is harder on himself. Reconsiderations reads in places like a humble mea culpa. He confesses to intellectual rashness, to "opaque" induction rather than use of logic, to having carried "analogy to excessive lengths . . . 'Going too far' is a standing temptation for me." But for relying on mythology as well as science, he accepts, wisely, no blame, since mythology has given him many of the insights that make his History a continuously startling experience. So long as science and mythology are used as "a carriage-and-pair and not a one-horse shay," he sees no need to apologize. On a much more serious level. Toynbee admits to errors that are basic to his entire scheme. He admits that using Hellenic civilization as the model by which to judge the decline and fall of others is a mistake. It leads him, in fact, to recast his whole view on the development of the "higher religions." No longer do they result from an "encounter" between two or more civilizations. They are in fact not byproducts of the vagaries of civilizations but the very base on which civilizations themselves rest.
Damaged, Not Toppled. To a close reader of the History, such a major shift is the equivalent of saying that the whole Study needs revision. Toynbee even finds it now necessary to revise his table of civilizations, one of the key points of his huge labor, and at one point he blandly confesses that "I now have to abandon my previous construction of three distinct civilizations." In the same way he acknowledges that his list of "arrested civilizations" is "capricious." Moreover, he tacitly agrees that he forced facts into theories when he writes: "I have also neglected to try other keys where the Hellenic key has not fitted the lock. These were faults, I confess."
What is even more startling, almost embarrassing, is Toynbee's attempt to rationalize his personal deficiencies. His cumbersome style, "my Latinizing way of writing English," he attributes to "my classical education." He also confesses, oddly for a historian, that he is "almost entirely ignorant of modern Western discoveries, from the seventeenth century onwards, in the fields of mathematics and physical science. This is indeed a big blank . . . In my knowledge of the non-Hellenic civilizations and the higher religions there are appalling gaps. And my knowledge of the aeons of history before these last 5,000 years is little better than sheer ignorance." And so it goes, deficiencies in anthropology, ignorance of geography, indifference to "economic and technological factors."