[26]_Op. cit._, I, 172-3. Edgar Wind, “Some Points of Contact Between History and Natural Science,” in _Philosophy and History, Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer_ (Oxford, 1936), 255-64, shows that the latest developments of science, which make it so much less “exact,” lead to the raising of questions by scientists “that historians like to look upon as their own.” But if these latest developments have made science more “humanistic,” Wind is over-optimistic when he says that “the notion of a description of nature which indiscriminately subjects men and their fates like rocks and stones to its ‘unalterable law’ survives only as a nightmare of certain historians.” For many of them (not to mention sociologists) it seems still to be a cherished ideal. [27]_A Study of History_, _e.g._, I, 143. [28]_Op. cit._, V, 28. [29]These texts have been discussed by Kurt Sethe, _Amun und die acht Urgötter von Hermopolis_. “Abhandlungen der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-Hist. Klasse,” No. 4. Berlin, 1929. [30]_A Study of History_, I, 137. It is, perhaps, not unnecessary to add that Toynbee’s scheme would be no more relevant to Egyptian history if he shifted the date of his “time of troubles” to the second or even the first millennium B.C. The error is one of method, not of chronology. [31]_Op. cit._, III, 377. [32]_Op. cit._, III, 248-377. In the history of individuals Toynbee applies it not only to the Buddha or to saints who of their own free will withdrew from society in order to clarify their mission and the message which they were to preach, but also to men like Thucydides, Dante, and Macchiavelli, who were exiled, and bitterly lamented their banishment even though it did not destroy their powers to create. They worked in a solitude not of their choosing and never returned at all, however effective their work may have proved to be in the course of time. Toynbee also applies the formula of “Withdrawal-and-Return” to social groups in a manner which fails to explain anything, as, for instance, when he states that the Nonconformists, after the Restoration, reacted on persecutions by “withdrawing into the realm of private business in order to return omnipotent, a century and a half later, as the authors of the Industrial Revolution” (_Ibid._, 334). Thus, the interplay of dire necessity and circumstances of every description is reduced to a formula which confuses the issue by a theological implication (withdraw in order to) which in more than one place (_e.g._ in the image of the climbers and the mountainside) turns Toynbee’s account of the facts into mythology. I am purposely avoiding a discussion of Toynbee’s examples taken from the Near East or Crete, since I should then have to correct his facts and should become a “critic aiming