Toynbee is not the first historian to introduce the notion of “progress” in his work, and the fallacy of this procedure has been well demonstrated by Collingwood.[20] Of his arguments we can quote only two passages. He maintains that a historian comparing two historical periods or ways of life must be able to “understand (them) historically, that is with enough sympathy and insight to reconstruct their experience for himself.” But that means that he has already accepted them as things to be judged by their own standards. Each is for the historian “a form of life having its own problems, to be judged by its success in solving those problems and no others. Nor is he assuming that the two different ways of life were attempts to do one and the same thing and asking whether the second did it better than the first. Bach was not trying to write like Beethoven and failing; Athens was not a relatively unsuccessful attempt to produce Rome.” Collingwood then indicates the exceptional (and really purely academic) case in which one may be entitled to speak of progress,[21] and in doing so touches upon a subject with which modern man is particularly concerned: Can we speak of progress in happiness or comfort or satisfaction? Obviously not.... The problem of being comfortable in a medieval cottage is so different from the problem of being comfortable in a modern slum that there is no comparing them; the happiness of a peasant is not contained in the happiness of a millionaire. Toynbee, though he is less precise than Collingwood, does formulate what he means by progress. He equates it with growth, and “growth is progress towards self-determination.”[22] But Toynbee, who is a believing Christian, surely knows that self-determination may not be a matter of gradual advance at all, but rather a flash-like illumination in which one’s true nature stands revealed. As a rule, the sequel to this experience is a life-long struggle for a realization of the vision. Why could not this type of self-determination also, like the slow and gradual realization, have an analogy in the life of civilizations? Flinders Petrie and others have maintained that every significant trait of Egyptian culture had been evolved before the end of the Third Dynasty. We find once more that Toynbee has uncritically proclaimed the universal validity of one of several possible sequences. And if he describes “the consummation of human history” as “accomplishing the transformation of Sub-Man through Man into Super-Man”[23] and calls this “the goal towards which ‘the whole creation groaneth and travaileth’ (Romans viii, 22),”[24] we may respect his faith but can hardly accept it as the argument of an “empirical student of history.”[25]