Within each culture there come into being characteristic purposes not necessarily shared by other types of society. In obedience to these purposes each people further and further consolidates its experience ... and the most ill-assorted acts become characteristic of its peculiar goals, often by the most unlikely metamorphoses. The form that these acts take we can understand only by understanding first the emotional and intellectual mainsprings of that society.[14] We have seen that any society selects some segment of the arc of possible human behaviour, and in so far as it achieves integration its institutions tend to further the expression of its selected segment and to inhibit the opposite expressions.[15] There is, in this last passage, a suggestion of the dynamics of the formation of a civilization but it is not this aspect but that of “form” which prevails in the work of Benedict or Malinowski. For modern savages are relatively stagnant if we discount the disturbances caused by the white man. Hence the title _Patterns of Culture_. It is, however, precisely the problem of the dynamics of cultural change—a problem misconstrued by Spengler and rightly ignored by Ruth Benedict—which lies at the centre of Arnold Toynbee’s work. The first three volumes of _A Study of History_ appeared in 1934, a second group of three in 1939, and a final group is still to be published. But we are told that the preoccupation from which the work has sprung, goes back as far as 1911, when Toynbee travelled in Crete and saw the newly discovered remains of the sea-empire of Minos. Then he chanced on the ruins of a Venetian villa, remnant of the time when Venice had dominated the Mediterranean with its galleys. And Toynbee was disconcerted at the thought that yet another empire that “rules the waves” even in our own day might follow its predecessors in decline.[16] Now a preoccupation with decay such as underlies Toynbee’s work need not in itself vitiate study of the birth of civilization; however, the “change and identity” of cultural forms must not be handled mechanically but with all the reverence for the singular which historical material demands. And it is here rather than in errors of fact (which are inevitable in a work of this scope) that we find Toynbee’s work defective. We must, moreover, take exception to his lack of critical precision and to the inadequacy of his conceptual apparatus. Toynbee, like Spengler, invests certain images which he uses with a spurious reality. These ostensible similes pervade the argument with an implied assurance that they reflect historical situations. When Toynbee compares civilizations with motor cars on a one-way street,[17] or with men resting or climbing on a mountainside, he conveys the impression (which he himself judges correct) that a definite direction, a forward or upward movement, is discernible in history. But such dynamics are imputed, not observed. He writes: