Our criticism does not proceed from a positivistic belief in a so-called “scientific” historiography which is supposed first to assemble objective facts which are subsequently interpreted. Our objection here is not against Toynbee’s procedure, but against a terminology which obscures what is the starting-point, and what the outcome, of his procedure. And we make the further criticism that he does not actually evolve from each particular historical situation the notion of a particular challenge to which it can be construed as a response; he applies the formula, as I have said, from the outside, and it is therefore doomed to irrelevance. For example: Toynbee considers the descent of the prehistoric Egyptians into the marshy Nile valley as their response to the challenge of the desiccation of North Africa. In their new homeland they faced, in due course, as a further challenge, “the internal articulation of the new-born Egyptiac society” and failed. The truth is that the Egyptians flourished exceedingly for two thousand years after the Pyramid Age; but Toynbee thinks they failed because he cannot conceive of a “response” in Egyptian terms, but only in those with which he is familiar: secular government, democracy, and the Poor Law.[34] But since neither the rich nor the poor Egyptians took this view of their state, Toynbee’s conclusion is irrelevant. It is true that he quotes the tales which dragomans told to late Greek travellers about the oppressive rule of the builders of the pyramids. But the actual folk-tales of Pharaonic Egypt show us that the people took as great a delight in tales of royalty as the public of the Arabian Nights took in the doings of the despot Harun al Rashid. Snefru, whom Toynbee names, is known as one of the most popular rulers in legend. The fact of the matter is that Toynbee should have started from an analysis of the “response.” This would not have shown, as Toynbee has it, that “Death laid its icy hand on the life of the growing civilization at the moment when the challenge that was the stimulus of its growth was transferred from the external to the internal field [from the subjugation of nature to the organization of society, H.F.] because in this new situation, the shepherds of the people betrayed their trust.”[35] Studied without preconceived ideas the “response” of the Egyptians stands revealed as a vastly different achievement. The ideal of a marvellously integrated society had been formed long before the pyramids were built; it was as nearly realized, when they were built, as any ideal social form can be translated into actuality; and it remained continuously before the eyes of rulers and people alike during subsequent centuries. It was an ideal which ought to thrill a western historian by its novelty, for it falls entirely outside the experience of Greek or Roman or Modern Man, although it survives, in an attenuated form, in Africa. It represents a