By a diabolical irony the very facsimiles of the world which we make on purpose to bring it within our grasp, to make it less elusive, have transport… - Daniel J. Boorstin

Seekers found clues in the successes, failures, and confusions of predecessors, who became their inspiration, their targets, their resource. From Socrates, Plato learned both caution and the need for bold patterns of meaning of his own. From Plato, Aristotle learned the perils of deserting the world of the senses. Still the later somehow did not make the earlier irrelevant. Seekers, like artists, never wholly displaced those who had tried before. They all enlarged and enriched the menu.

"Religions played an increasingly dominant role in Toynbee's view as he grew older and advanced with his "Study of History." "The principal cause of war in our world today." he wrote on Apirl 9, 1935, in the Manchester Guardian, "is the idolatrous worship which is paid by human beings to nations and communities of states. This tribe-worship is the oldest religion of mankind, and it has only been overcome in so far as human beings have been genuinely converted to Christianity or one of the other higher religions....The spirit of man abhors a spiritual vacuum....People will sacrifice themselves for the 'Third Reich' ir wgatever tge Ersatz-Gotzen may be, till they learn again to sacrifice themselves for the Kingdom of God." After 1937, Toynbee flirted with Catholicism and he came to believe that the meaning of history would be revealed only in the slow and painful clarification of the relation between God and man."

"But for Aristotle the meaning was hidden in the particulars of experience. The scope of his work was itself witness to his belief in the unity of experience and his confidence that it could somehow be encompassed by the human mind. And so he confirms his axiom that "the actuality of thought is life.