This book is not intended either to show why
history happened that way or that civilization is at the crossroads.
It has a more modest purpose: to show how some thinkers, most
of whom were not historians, tried to make the past meaningful
to their own present. None of these thinkers was primarily con-
cerned with how history ought to be written: but they were all
trying, in one way or another, to explain how it was to be inter-
preted. Most of the speculation in this field today is by philos-
ophers, whose business it is to analyze abstract concepts within
some particular framework of meaning. Historians, on the other
hand, usually assess concrete evidence relating to a particular
series of past events. The authors in these readings fall into
neither category, although they have something in common with
both: most of them have related large groups of historical events
to an abstraction, sometimes philosophical and sometimes theo-
logical, in order to demonstrate a kind of inner coherence in the
past as a whole that neither historians nor philosophers today
would ordinarily attempt. (Toynbee is a notable exception.) Since
I am a historian, not a philosopher or theologian, I have tried, both
in the choice of readings and in the prefaces, not so much to offer
a critique of the standard of truth these writers used but to suggest
why an author writing within his particular cultural and intel-
lectual framework would have seen patterns in that way.

Philosophy of history can be defined as the attempt to relate
the whole human past, or even any considerable part of it, to a

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