2 J.-A. PEMBERTON
Yet irrespective of the massive amount of historical data on which
Toynbee drew in charting the course civilisations, his own approach
was hardly in conformity with the approach that one typically associates
with the expression ‘English empiricism’. Indeed, Toynbee’s A Study of
History was greatly informed by a notion derived from the theory of crea-
tive evolution elaborated by the French philosopher and first president of
the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) of the
League of Nations (LON) which many of Toynbee’s English peers viewed
saw as loose, speculative and even mystical: the élan vital (life-force).^4
According to Bergson, it is the élan vital which explains the onward rush
of life: although life’s particular articulations may become immobile and
decay, life itself rushes ever forward. Alongside this forward movement
an ‘essential’ feature of the élan vital concerns, as Bergson explained, the
‘unforseeability of the forms that life creates’.^5
Bergson was fond of saying that the future lies in our hands and more
particularly, that our future trajectory greatly depends on our ability ‘to
open what was closed’.^6 Here, it is important to note that for Bergson,
it is ‘human individuals and not human societies that “make” human his-
tory’.^7 Bergson stated in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les
deux sources de la morale et de la religion), that history only takes a for-
ward leap when society ‘allows itself to be convinced’ or ‘shaken’ and that
the ‘shake’ which propels society forward must ‘always be given by some-
one’.^8 For Bergson, the someone in question concerns the one or several
individuals possessed of moral genius: he states that it is ‘only to the thrust
of genius’ that the ‘inertia of humanity has ever yielded.’^9 According to
Bergson, society will remain caught in a ‘vicious circle’ until that time
(^4) Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 3, 125.
(^5) Henri Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 58th ed. (Paris: Les
Presses universitaires de France, 1948), 62, http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/berg-
son_henri/deux_sources_morale/deux_sources.pdf. See also Toynbee, A Study of History,
vol. 3, 125.
(^6) Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 164. See also Toynbee, A Study
of History, vol. 3, 125.
(^7) Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 3, 231.
(^8) Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 40. See also Toynbee, A Study of
History, vol. 3, 231.
(^9) Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 92. See also Toynbee, A Study of
History, vol. 3, 237.