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Toynbee views with the perspective of a historian the place of psychoanalysis in the development of human thought. Although mankind has for hundreds of thousands of years possessed and utilized intellect and will, it has been aware of its possession of these faculties for not much more than twenty-five hundred years. Their discovery was made in India, Greece, and perhaps simultaneously in China. Toynbee limits his discussion to the consequences of the Greek contribution.
Following Bergson, Toynbee describes the tendency of mankind to treat a new discovery as if it were the sole and sovereign key to all knowledge and power. The Greek discovery of the intellect led to an emphasis which equated it with the whole of the psyche. All successive schools of Greek philosophy and latter-day Western philosophy have either altogether ignored the existence of any other elements in the psyche or else, in so far as they have taken cognizance of nonintellectual elements, they have tried to describe them in terms applicable to the intellect but not to themselves. Only now, with psychoanalysis, is a new science developing which, though it is itself an intellectual activity, attempts the study of these nonintellectual elements in terms of their own nature.
Toynbee asks how did mankind get along for the hundreds of thousands of years before the Greek discovery of the intellect. He sees a clue to the answer in a 'spiritual vision', the 'first and last' sense of every psyche, which seeks truth through the medium of poetry and prophecy and expresses the truth that it finds in the poet's and the prophet's language. This is the language of the unconscious, and Toynbee pleads that it be permitted to speak for itself through the channels of poetry and prophecy.
He wonders if a scientific-minded age can afford to admit the legitimacy of a poetical truth, which must take over when scientific truth with its limited scope can go no further, and he ventures the answer that ultimate truth migh