It is, in fact, odd that Toynbee, who opens his work with an excellent statement of the relativity of historical thought, who complains that “a local and temporary standpoint has given our historians a false perspective,” remains himself so completely under the spell of a nineteenth-century western outlook. His evolutionary bias, his empiricism, and his treatment of civilizations as “specimens of a species” are all of a piece. He sometimes equals Spengler in myth-making, treating his equation of civilizations and living beings as a reality, and appealing to biological opinion to uphold a historical conclusion.[26] His use of “species” and “genus” obscures the fundamental fact that science can study individuals as members of a species only by ignoring their individual characteristics. The historian, following this course, would defeat the very purpose of his work. In fact, Toynbee’s vaunted empiricism is an attempt to transpose the method of the natural sciences, where experiment is essential and experience is reduced to figures, to history, where experiment is impossible and experience subjective. Toynbee’s “experience” (a word which, in the case of a historian, may stand for intimate acquaintance with historical data) is confined to classical antiquity and its western descendant. It is an odd fact that he should have supposed this limited field capable of supplying the conceptual apparatus with which every historical phenomenon could be comprehended, and that he should have done this, not unconsciously, but knowingly, although unaware of the enormity of his assumption. For anyone moving outside western tradition should soon discover the truth that the values found in different civilizations are incommensurate. And so we find Toynbee, like Spengler, doing violence to the evidence and forcing each civilization into a preconceived system of categories. In his case the system is not, like Spengler’s, an imaginative construction; but it is derived from the crucial period in western history when the Roman Empire disintegrated. His generalization of particular circumstances results not in historical errors but in irrelevancies. It would be a tedious and laborious task to demonstrate this to the full; but let us take two characteristic quotations referring to Egypt.