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At this point the reader may well ask if Toynbee hasn't totally disqualified himself as the author of his own book. The answer is no. Anyone who has read the History knows that he treats himself too harshly. The ignorance he pleads is, in fact, a relative thing: what single historian other than he knows so much or has used his knowledge with such soaring imagination? And who besides Spengler has had the audacity to escape from the drugging minutiae of documentary sweepings into the exhilarating reaches of man's whole past? Toynbee lacerates himself too much, and the total effect is damaging. But not annihilating. For after all, A Study of History exists, and it is Toynbee's monument. In Reconsiderations he has chipped it more severely than have all his critics put together, but even this unprecedented exercise in self-criticism leaves it in no danger of toppling.