The author has consulted a vast number of writers on subjects ranging from astrology to Zoroastrianism. He is familiar with the Old and New Testaments, with Buddhistic and Hindu texts, the Mahayanian budhisattvas , the classical works (poetical and philosophical) of ancient Greece and Rome, the German, Italian and French philosophers of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and, of course, with contemporary theories on man and the universe. But with none of these is Mr. Toynbee completely satisfied. Nor has he given us his own convictions on these questions, perhaps because he has no convictions. It would be difficult to find a book that is so well written and so unsatisfactory. In the first chapter Mr. Toynbee asks the question: 'What is the nature of the Universe? a question', he adds, 'that all historians ought to be trying to answer'. It is certainly not the function of the historian to discuss the nature of the universe. This is the philosopher's field. Mr. Toynbee says the historian's point of view is one of his more recent acquisitions in relation to the historic era. But because of his preoccupation with a time-space dimension in connection with the historian's viewpoint, the author gets himself involved in a discussion that confuses him and consequently his reader, and this in spite of the apparent lucidity of his statements.