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achieves reality through his relation to other bodies, with the Gods as the upper limit and the slave as the lower. This explains Aristotle's statement that only a fool of a God could live alone and makes the idea of an Athenian Robinson Crusoe unthinkable. The Gods were merely perfectly formed bodies of more than average powers, though equally subject with other bodies to the blind working of Tyche. Zeus in the Iliad holds up the scale, not to determine, but to learn Hector's fate.

The Platonic conception of the soul, as a sum of excellent parts, with Reason in the Olympian commanding position, emerges as the classical image just as its yearning for conciseness constructed a scientific theory of static mechanics. The problem of the relation between the knower and the known Plato resolved as a matter-of-course into a passage of knowledge to the recipient. His captives in the cave were really captives, objects of the light from the common sun, not - as in Kant egos - imposing their forms on the world, not sums themselves irradiating the universe.

The Attic drama was a drama of the moment. Its heroes represent Euclidian bodies, struck in a position they did not choose, assailed by the blind forces of Fate, the jealousy of the Gods, the sudden total negation of being, as the most terrible of experiences. What happens to Hamlet is the consequence of a meaningful inner development, but Oedipus is the

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 316.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 311.

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victim of circumstances that could happen to anyone. The
Grand Gesture, which defines a being to other bodies, repres-
ents the only possible course of action of the soma that is
being gratuitously destroyed. Spiritual characterization was
prevented by the wearing of masks and the padding of figures
made movement almost impossible.
1

Classical architecture was ever forced to fight against
the assertiveness of pure being, which it threatened by the im-
plication of permanence inherent in building. This gave rise
to the Classical temple, of extreme poverty of form, since the
recognition of many styles would have been an admission of a
type of infinity. Its columns of uneven spacing, its accentua-
tion of beam and load, its flat roof all served as a denial of
space and an affirmation of the exclusive validity of the present.
Appollinian art became a production of great feebleness of char-
acterization, but also of timeless evenness.
2

Since Natural Science is the outward expression of the
soul-image, the causal description of the religious view, a
static mechanics resulted. The human tendency to reduce its
nature-picture to the minimal forms capable of intellectual
manipulation issued in an atomic theory, of small, perfectly
elastic bodies, of unpredictable motion operating through shock
and countershock. Motion became not a spatial force but an at-
tribute of bodies. Thus the greatest creation of the Classical
3

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 325.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 316.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 385.

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scientific mind was Euclidian geometry, the measurement and
circumscription of concrete representations.

This, too, applied to Classical political life. The
feudal kingdoms of the Homeria period ever contracted their
horizon until the polis were reached, a pure point of being,
where the Greek, a body among other bodies, could view his
world from the Acropolis. This conception of a political or-
ganization as a self-contained city-state, which made every-
thing beyond the horizon strange and potentially hostile led
to the struggle to sheer extinction which ever characterized
the politics of Hellas. The only issue of these campaigns could
be the razing of the city and the extermination or enslavement
of the hostile populations. The ideal of each polis was autar-
kia, complete economic independence, a minimum of intercourse
with other city-states, a state of blissful present being, the
utopia of Plato, Aristotle and all Greek statesmen. The anti-
historical instinct expressed itself in the complete spoilage
of natural resources. The prudent, long-term policy of Western
cultures were completely unknown. Surpluses when achieved was
distributed among the population. 1

Even Rome was merely a polis become immense. It dotted
the Mediterranean with dependencies in poli-form, its focus of
attention ever the embodiment in a point, of regional existence.
Thus Rome knew Alexandria, but not Egypt. Even after citizen-
ship was granted to all Italians, the center and meaning of

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 407.

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events remained Rome. The idea of transferring the vote from
Rome to the residence of the citizen never occurred to any
Roman statesman.

Spengler's conception of the classical soul reveals its
essence as a negation of Time, just as its history was episodic,
of a great mass of detail but no inner relation. ¹ It clung to
the coast of the Mediterranean in clusters of tightly organ-
ized city-states, with no serious attempt to explore the hinter-
land. To settle far from the coast would have meant to lose
touch with home. The immigration into the U.S., the lonely
pioneering in the West, the explorations of a Columbus or Marco
Polo, all were beyond the possibilities of Classical Mankind. ²

So the Appollinian culture grew in the process of actual-
izing its life-symbol of pure bodily presence and so it died
without knowing it through its lack of historical perspective.

1. No inner relation to the Classical Mind.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 336.

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Faustian Soul

Spengler dates the history of the Western culture from
the years 900-1000. At that time, the fear of the end of the
world, the confused yearning of the Merovingian and Carolingian
period, the dark groping of the migrations suddenly coalesced
and the Western soul appeared, its essence a striving into the
infinite, a passionate drive to overcome all limit, to lose
itself in the quest for the eternal. Its representative for
Spengler is the Faustian man, an integer of force, will and
action-at-a-distance, a lonely ago in an endless void, feel-
ing time as an expression of directedness, projecting his
determination into all his activities. In almost every respect
this emerging culture represents the polar opposite of the
Appollinian. The Greek Gods dwell on Olympus, "but Valhalla
is nowhere, a mystic resting place, with its disharmonious Gods
and heroes the very symbol of solitude."

The Faustian Culture, too, made its great refusal. It,
too, was faced with the symbols of a Civilization inwardly dis-
connected and ever remote. Though, the West took over the Magian
religion of Christianity, it remodeled those concepts to fit
the dynamic yearning in its soul and replaced the theology of
the substantiality of God and His modes, by its passionate
assertion of the Father-God, Force itself, constant activity,
not capable of embodiment in a shape comprehensible by the human
mind. Yet the whole longing of the young soul, its feeling of

1. Spengler - op. cit. Vol I. p. 186.

2. Spengler - op. cit. Vol II. p. 288.

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Care, the determination to prevail extending in time both in-
to the past and into the future over many generations, coal-
esced in its specific creation, the Mother Mary. Her crowning
in Heaven was one of the earliest motifs of Faustian art. She
became the light-figure in blue, the smiling dispenser of Grace,
finally culminating in the festival among the English Benedic-
tines of the Immaculate Conception, which completed Her dis-
embodiment.

Yet this world of purity, bliss and happiness involved
at the same time the counter-creation of the early Gothic -
the realm of the Devil, who throughout Mary's world of infin-
ite understanding, was lurking in the background ever ready,
to tempt, to lead astray, to destroy the soul. Only the late
condition of his culture prevents Western Man - according to
Spengler - from understanding the terrible fear that then hung
over humanity, of stumbling into the abyss. There were witches
sabaths and black magic, night feast on mountain-tops and charm-
formula. A pitiless, constant war had to be waged against
the prince from Hell and his fallen angels. "Wretches confessed
to witchcraft, sincerely imagining it to be true and inquisi-
tors with tears in their eyes sentenced them to the Pyre, for
it was Hell, not death, that humanity feared."

This explains the sense of guilt that permeates all Gothic
longing. The cathedrals rose ever more pleadingly towards heaven,

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol II. p. 279.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol II. p. 293.

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the vaulting turned into hands folded in prayer and little help came to man through the stained windows into the semi-darkness of the naves. Man was a lonely Ego, lost in the infinite, with the powers of darkness-all-around. "For Magian man heaven was impending, but to the Faustian heaven was infinitely far." There arose the ever finer differentiation of notions the desire to lose selfness, the universal, cry for the Grace that unbinds the will.

To be able to will freely is the highest desire of Faustian transcendence. The sacraments elevated into dogma by the Lateran Council of 1215, mean in their deepest significance the unbinding of the will. The transformation of the meaning of the altar sacrament into an assertion of free being results - the conception of the one who sacrificed himself to insure for his own freedom to will.

The sacrament of Contrition represents the noblest manifestation of the Faustian world-longing. Baptism one receives by virtue of one's humanity, contrition is the recognition of the uniqueness of the personality, which alone determines the value of the act. Each man can search only his own conscience. The release and bliss given by this sacrament constitutes one of the profoundest creations of all religious effort, a release from the dark clouds of unresolved doubts that ever remain in the big crisis of life. The insecurity resulting from the decline

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol I. p. 290.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol II. p. 292.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol II. p. 293.

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of this sacrament caused the Mary world of light to fade out.

1. Only the world of the devil remained. "The concept of the priesthood of all believers, is one to which a few strong souls can win through, but only as the part of priesthood that involves duties not powers, for no man ever confesses to himself with the inward certainty of absolution." So the Faustian yearning for release from its longing, for an expression of its conviction that "tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner", to overcome the inner warfare within its soul, calls on its contempories instead of the infinite as judges and priests. Thus is born the auto-biographical art of Rembrandt's self-portraits, of Bach's and above all Beethoven's music, each a confession of a tortured soul seeking release. But in this tension, too, the concern with the Ego causes a loss of the felt unity of the universe, a symptom of the beginning of the "Late" stage of the Culture.

Thus arises the Faustian feeling that evaluates the act with reference to the deed not the deed, the psychology that sees forces of willing, feeling, thinking striving for dominance in a dynamic cosmology.

Faustian art, too, is an embodiment of this yearning for infinity. Though its early manifestation was architectural, stone with its affirmation of the body could never serve as the final expression of the Western soul. Michelangelo passionately

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II p. 294.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol II. p. 295.

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fought with its limitations, each of his creations a battle
frozen in stone. But only the advent of perspective painting
began to give release. One stands before a Greek frescoe, but
one sinks into a Rembrandt painting. The depth-experience of
the Western culture, which experiences everything as mere centers
of gravity in a spatial dynamics is expressed in the Western
perspective which directs the position of the spectator and pulls
him into its space treatment. But the true Western art, that
represents the eternal straining of its restless soul is that
of contrapunctal music. This completes the disembodiment of
space, expressed the upsoaring drive, filled the cathedrals in
Bach and burst beyond into space in Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.
But with Wagner, size is no longer the inward representation
of greatness but the dissimulation of its absence and just as
Pergamos, it heralds the end of the great tradition.

Faustian natural-science represents a mere mirror of
these tendencies. What is felt as God in religious experience,
becomes the concept of all-pervasive Force in physics. Where
the Appollinian world-feeling consists of a passionate assertion
of the bodiliness of its objects, the Western soul tends towards
a denial of all substantiality. Space itself is felt as a
force, expressed by Newton as gravity and stated by atomic
physics in the form of quanta of energy. Natural science

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 241 and p. 330.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 291.

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becomes ever more esoteric and abstract, dissolving in its
hypothesis all sense-experience of phenomenal reality. The
infinite space of the universe postulated by astronomy, the
endless geological periods are not empirical observations, but
a resolve of the soul, that considers the recognition of limits
a denial of its existence. It is the spirit that motivated the
invention of gun-powder - action-a-distance and discovered in-
dependently by the Chinese, whose destiny idea is comparable
to the Western, at a contemporary stage of development.

This is the mentality that produces dynasties as the
objects of reverence, the embodiment of its feeling of Care, in
the political world. Cabinet diplomacy, the determination to
master space, the travels of Spanish and Portuguese explorers,
the pioneers of the American West, the drive for records of any
sort all are emanations of the Faustian will-to-infinity. The
immense practicability of the West, that views the whole world
as a working hypothesis, and its great symbol the machine as
a perpetuum mobile represents the assertion of Mastery over
nature which appears in metaphysical shape in the Kantian forms
a priori.

The Faustian will-to-power expresses the inner need of
a Culture that recognizes toleration only as the non-interfer-
ence with a field of activity, which ever attempts to impose
its views on behalf of mankind. This accounts for the loneliness

1. See post Chapter "Politics, Economics, The Machine".

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of Faustian man, of which Lear on the Heath buffeted by man
and Nature, and Hamlet are the tragic exponents. Where the
lament of the hero expresses the essence of the Appollinian
dramatic intention the inner distance of Shakespearean heroes
is unbridgeable.

The ethics of the great deed which in Gothic times was
felt as an inner experience in one's fight towards God, is trans-
formed by the plebeian morale of the late culture into a Right-
to-work. This is Socialism, which seeks to impose its views
on behalf of all and which will soon press its concepts to the
ultimate Faustian conclusion - the Duty to Work. The ethical
force of the West contains always the imperative, ever the "Thou
shalt".

This then is Spengler's representation of the Faustian
soul a boundless drive towards infinity, a will-to-power, a
longing of a lonely ego in a boundless space that has lost its
bliss with the Reformation and its God with the Enlightenment.
In the years of autumn and approaching decline its major efforts
will lie in the technical field before the advent of mysticism
and Caesarism will stifle all intellectual activity. But just
because Western man represents a transcendent view of history,
he is eminently fit to write its morphology. The Classical
could not encompass such a view. Its tragedy was the senseless
incident. But the culture of Shakespeare, who lifts the incident

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 372 - Written in 1919.

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Pseudo-Morphosis

"In a rock-stratum are embedded crystals of a mineral. Clefts and cracks occur, water filters in and the crystals are gradually washed out so that in due course only their hollow mould remains. Then come volcanic outbursts which explode the mountain; molten masses pour in, stiffen and crystallize out in their turn. But these are not free to do so in their own special form. They must fill up the spaces that they find available. Thus there arise distorted forms, crystals whose inner structure contradicts their external shape, stones of one kind, presenting the appearance of another kind. The mineralogists call this phenomenon Pseudomorphosis".

Historical pseudo-morphosis Spengler defines as the
process in which an alien Culture hangs so heavily over the
birth-place of a young Culture, that the latter can not attain
its own inner development. Its spirituality is forced into
strange forms, which are infused with new meaning, but at the
same time serve to stifle the inner drive of the Culture's
Youth. Such Cultures can only look on the strange form with
all-consuming hatred, spending their latent creativity in half-
hearted efforts, ever ready to burst through the fetters in a
violent orgy.

Such - for Spengler - was the case of Petrine Russia

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol II. p. 189.

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which accepted a dynastic form of government in imitation of
a Culture from which it was inwardly remote. Only the form-
less power of the early Romanovs could have succeeded in guiding
this young soul, which felt the large cities as effervescent
illusions and which remained a peasantry longing for the soil
no matter how large the cosmopolis. Thus there developed no
aristocracy that embodied a destiny, only a senseless aping
of alien practices. The intelligentsia grew up as an adjunct
to the Court, ever bent on discovering problems that were not
felt against the background of a peasantry that mixed a hatred
for the alien form that was stifling the culture, with a dis-
gust with its own overgrowth.

1. Dostojevski, the peasant, and
Tolstói, the man of Western society represent this opposition.
"The one could never in his soul get away from the land, the
other, in spite of his desperate efforts, could never get near
it".

2. Tolstói is the spokesman of Petrinism - even in his
denial. His rejection of society is intellectual, his hatred
of property based on economics. The very inability to shake
off the West leads to his hatred of all existing forms and he
therefore becomes the true precursor of Bolshevism. For Bolshe-
vism is merely the rebellion of the lowest strata of the Petrine
society, that has ever talked about Christ, but in its heart,
meant Marx. It represents the final debasing of the metaphysical

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II p. 194.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II p. 194.

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by the social and becomes thereby a new form of the Pseudo-1
morphosis.

Dostojevski is the true enemy of this upheaval representing in his soul the future of Russia. All agitation about social reform, all technical schemes for world betterment remain equally meaningless to him. Just as Christ, he would have felt no difference between working for one's own material benefit or the mere social betterment of others. For how can 2 Communism aid the agony of the soul? Thus Dostojevski embodies the destiny of Russia, the victim now of the last stages of its Pseudomorphosis, the forms of which are ever filled with the deep spirituality of the boundless plain and which will be swept away just as its predecessor, without hatred, by 3 the inner logic of the actualizing of the Russian soul.

So it was with the Magian soul which grew up in the forms of the Classical after Actium. All the mystic longing of that East, where strange tales of a Messiah were current, which felt the existence of an immanent God, a Yahwe, Ahuramadza or Marduk-Baal with the certainty of an apocalyptic fulfillment had to realize itself in the West in the forms of the Classical cult. The Appollinian gods were deities of places, bodies of the sensuously near. Each locality possessed its divinity to

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 195.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 217.

3. Attention is drawn to the description by Bedell Smith of Christmas mass in Moscow. - B. Smith - My Three Years in Moscow.

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which homage was due. This explains the altar to the unknown Gods, which Paul as a child of the Pseudo-morphosis misunderstood in a monotheistic sense. This was designed for gods not known by name whom the foreign sailors at the great seaports 1 worshipped. Thus Classical toleration could extend to all sects that made no claim to exclusive validity and any transgression of these limits resulted in the intermittent persecution of the Stoa in Athens and the Christians in Rome.

This explains, too, the change of world-feeling implied by the universal law of reason of the Stoa and the mystery-cults typified by the cult of Mithras. Formerly the god was conceived as adhering to the place of worship but now a community of any two believers constituted a church. The Spirit of God hovering in the above, ever ready to descend into his elect is the universal production of this age. Only the incomparable symbolism of the person of Christ, representing the very essence of the opposition between fact and truth, Time and Space, History and Causality distinguishes Neo-Platonism, Mithraism and Christianity. A Magian nation is a consensus of believers. When Constantine recognized Christianity as the official religion, he did not acknowledge a cult but established a new community. But long before, the spirit of the East had permeated Roman institutions, symbolized by the transfer of the capital to Byzantium and the Divus cult, which made the Roman Emperors

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 404.

the first Caliphs.

Yet the spirit of the West was that of a Civilization,
cold, highly conceptualized. The direction of Christianity
under the guidance of Paul, who preached in the cities, remained
ever aloof from the apocalyptic feeling of the countryside in
the East. The attempt of conceptually defining the Logos idea
led to the violent secession of the Monophysites and Nestorians.
And when Islam appeared it was greeted as liberator by the spirit
which recognized its own inner essence and spread with the rapid-
ity of a soul that was robbed of its youth and feels its time
is limited.

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The Magian Soul

Spengler's symbol for the Magian world image is a cavern, filled with dim light. In the uneasy tensions of waking consciousness, the opposition of becoming and being, that the Classical conceived as beam and load, and the Faustian felt as force and Mass, consists for the Magian of an unsure swaying of substantial realities. Up and down, heaven and earth are substances that contend with one another in a cosmos revealing the Divine. Death is not the end of life but a death substance that struggles with a life-substance for the mastery of man. Out of this basic yearning, with man the theater of battles between the powers of darkness and evil, emerges the Concept of God the Divine Mediator who transforms this state from torment into bliss.

Man consists of a soul and body, both different modes of the same substance deriving their reality and participating in the light only through the infusion of the Divine Pneuma, which serves as the condition for the heroic deeds of a Samson, the holy wrath of Elijah, the enlightenment of Solomon. This infusion of the divine into the bodies of the faithful, binds the community of believers into a consensus and makes it at one with the enigmatic power above. Thus man as body and soul belongs to himself alone. But at the same time he contains something else, something higher, an emanation of God, which

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 237.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 236.

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precludes error but also makes totally meaningless a self-asserting Ego. Will and thought are not prime-phenomena, but already manifestations of the divine in Man.

God is immanent in every manifestation of phenomenal appearance, the one Cause immediately underlying all visible workings. Magian science concerns itself with apprehending the substance which appears in only different modes in actuality, with purging it of its "foreign" element, with alchemy.

Time, too, is cavernlike. The thrusting outward into infinity of the Faustian soul, develops into the divine plan for salvation, into the essence of which any inquiry constitutes profanation. The Magian soul, first identified the story of the world with the history of Man, into inexorable stages of world-beginning, world-development and a world catastrophe, which contains the sanction of the moral history of humanity. The operation of the autocratic will, precludes not only individual causes and effects, not only obviates the concept of the miraculous but also denies any necessary relation between sin and punishment, any claim to reward for virtue. Man's reality consists of his participation in the divine pneuma, which after its infusion allows only will-less resignation (Islam-resignation) into the mysterious working out of God's plan. "Magian man received Grace, but did not acquire it." Job is the Magian Faust.

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 235.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 240.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 241.

-85-

Three emanations of the divine occur, God, the Word of God, the Spirit of God. The consensus of the faithful, imbued with the Spirit of God, is beyond the possibility of deception.

1. "My people can never agree in error", said Mohammed. This explains the early church-council, which the West in its revaluation of all things Magian, transformed into a political concept for the limitation of a dynamic Papacy. The God-as-Word represents the substantial infusion of the divine into the sacred texts. This form of Revelation is the rule in the Magian religion. The only change that an unalterable Koran permits is commentary, leading to the development of an exegis with mystical undermeanings, the Halaka of which the Gospels in 2. early Christianity and the Talmud of Judaism are examples.

It follows that a separation of Church and state is impossible in the Magian culture. The consensus is itself a church, its law in the sacred book the only idea of nationality open to the believers. But also the development of a strong priesthood is precluded. Man stands in direct relation to the divine in so far as he participates in the pneuma and beyond that nothing avails. The true priest of the Magian culture is the hermit, the true bliss of its religion ecstacy when the soul is at one with God and the dark forces of materiality are defeated.

Yet until the coming of Islam this Magian world had to live under the forms of the Classical which it gradually

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 245.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 245.

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infused with its own spirituality. The pillars of the temple moved inside the mosque, a cupola replaced the flat roof, giving the impression of space, but a space enclosed in the cave. Into it a window in the roof let the dim light that, reflected from the gold-ground walls, created an atmosphere of fairy-land unreality, the scene for the operation of an omnipotent, ever-present God. Such was St. Sophia and the Pantheon in Rome.

This, too, is the world of Spinoza, whose causa sui, represents the immanent Deity and to whom inner certainty was the only criterion of knowledge, the geometric method representing merely a manifestation of Western Pseudomorphosis. It is the world that Christ knew and that Faustian religion can scarcely comprehend. It petrified around 800 and since the Crusades has persisted in the fellah-state of unchanging dogmatism and creative impotence.

Spengler's metaphors on the forms of the soul are deeply suggestive and yet they rest on an intuition striving for absolutes, ever expressing itself in the cruest possible manner.
His evocation of the souls of the cultures is of a persuasive-ness that makes abstract criticism appear dogmatic. Still one must ask whether he was not describing tendencies, instead of unchangeable relations. Achilles is hardly a body, placed in a position he did not choose, nor does the Iliad assume consistency of personality. Indeed the very essence of its tragedy

1. Spengler op. cit., Vol. II. p. 229.

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consists of the efforts of a man to master fate, to exact con-
ditions from this world and of the final acceptance of his
humanity, his recognition of limits. Polybius, moreover, wrote
a philosophy of history that compares favorably with many
creations of the "historical" Faustian Culture, and the scheme
of which is very similar to Spengler's concepts of gradual, in-
evitable degeneration. Spinoza, may be a product of the Magian
soul, but Friedrich has characterized him with equal persuasive-
ness as a product of the Calvinist concept of pre-destination,
his conatus God's sanction to the "elect". The idea of a con-
sensus represents perhaps an emanation of the Magian soul, but
not exclusively so. The history of the Law of Nature in West-
ern philosophy demonstrates the pervasiveness of his concept;
Rousseau's General Will reveals its theoretical application
to politics.

Thus the eloquence of the soul-images is nevertheless
unable to hide the fact that alternative explanations of equal
conviction are possible. This does not disprove Spengler's
concepts but it does cast doubt on the inaxorability of a devel-
opment which constitutes a function of these soul-images.

Spengler considers the interrelationship of cultures,
except for Pseudo-morphosis of only incidental importance. It

1. Friedrich - Inevitable Peaco - p. 143 et. seq.

2. For my brief analysis see post Ch. "History and Man's Exper-
ience of Morality".

-88-

was an accident that the Spaniards landed in Mexico, but in-
ward necessity that the Maya Empire collapsed, since it already
had reached the fellah stage. The adoption of Christianity
by the west represents but an incident, a symbol which was then
necessarily infused with the specific Gothic religiosity. Yet
such a strict separation seems untenable. It can hardly be
maintained that this outpouring of spirituality was not itself
influenced by the forms which it used. The superimposition of
a ripe dogma, of the universality of law on an essentially
primitive community, undoubtedly permeated the later history
of what was so significantly called; "Holy Roman Empire German
by Nation". Spengler himself has shown how the forms of
language determine the structure of cognition, the meaningless-
ness of the equation S= 1/2 gt unless expressed in words. How
much more strongly must the transfer of a high legal tradition,
a profound philosophy have affected a nascent culture?

Similarly, the dynamic stage of each culture seems to
involve a radiation, of its influence, in art, religion, and
political form over neighboring societies, as Eduard Meyer and
Toynbee show. Conversely the border regions are never free from
foreign influence particularly during the periods of decline.
The British influence on India has proved of significance
regardless of the adaptation which parliamentary government
may eventually receive. The infusion of new meaning into es-
tablished forms can not be equivalent to original creation.

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II p. 113.

To be sure, at times, Spengler recognizes this. He speaks of the effect of Christianity on a soul already pre-disposed to reverence. He regrets the shackles put by Classical mathematics on Western science until Descartes. He expresses gratification about the fortuitous circumstance that freed Western painting through the loss of almost all the classical frescoe art. But what does fortuitous mean in such a context? Is it not a recognition of the interrelationship of cultures, an admission of a continuation of certain forms which moreover in turn condition their user? Spengler fails to explain just what factor underlies any continuity of ideation or how the selection of symbols is accomplished.

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Politics, Economics, The Machine.

The metaphysical opposition between becoming and being,
the assertion of the ultimate supremacy of Time over Space,
form the basis of Spengler's political theory. Just as the
development of the culture constitutes an organic growth char-
acterized by the gradual dominance of a waking-consciousness
doomed to self-destruction, so politics exhibits an eternal
conflict between blood and concept, tradition and dogma. The
aging of the Culture is accompanied by the decline of that
surity of political form which signifies a mature organism.
Mere interest replaces the earlier subordination to an all-em-
bracing idea, money supplants tradition as the motive-force.
At each stage, however, the race aspect of life triumphs over
its causal representation, first in the victory of economics
over abstract political systems and finally in the emergence
of the naked power of Caesarism.

Spengler considers politics as the essence of life,
manifested in a will for survival, its criterion self-assurance,
that allows only the choice between victory and ruin, not be-
tween war and peace. He distinguishes two aspects in the des-
tiny side of life, the preserving and the mastering. They are
symbolized by the separation of the sexes. The woman is history
and represents the life of the race; the man makes history. The
woman accepts only with difficulty that other history which takes
her sons from her and the man ever experiences a conflict of
duties between the public and the private manifestations of

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1

Destiny, the sword and the spindle side of being, the State
or the Family emanation of directional Time.

Property, too, as a trait of race, belonging to History
and reduced to a concept only with the advent of the Cosmopolis,
exhibits this duality. It is expressed in the twin attributes
of possession: Having as power and having as booty. From the
feeling of power stems conquest, politics and law; from that
of booty derives trade, spoil and money. This explains the
superiority of money over dogma in the constitutional struggle
of the early civilization, but the emergence of money as the
dominant form in turn heralds a decline of political vitality.

Spengler argues that all success in history, war and
"in that continuation of war by other means called politics"
has been the product of unities that found themselves "in form".
A being is in form in the same sense as the term is used in
sports. When athletes are in form the ease of their perfor-
mance hides the difficulty of their acts. A style, that has
become second nature, signifies an art period "in form". A
political unit is in condition when its tradition breeds a high
average, enabling it to dispense with the great men, whose in-
cidental appearance frequently does more harm than good by the
void their death leaves in the flow of events.

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 327.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 330.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 444 - See also T. S. Elliott: Notes towards a Definition of Cultures.

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The components of a Culture attain "form" as a people, which grows to inward greatness only against other peoples. A people is in form as a "State", representing history at rest. Since it belongs to Time a mere description of constitutional provisions can not explain the state's essence, the real expressions of which are those conventions and practices of which the constitution is all the more silent for their being taken for granted.

World history for Spengler is state-history and not class-history. Political leadership belongs always to a small minority possessing the instinct of statesmanship and representing the nation in the struggle of existence. The more naturally the internal arrangements of the state have developed, the surer they adapt themselves to crisis situations. The inner constitution of a nation must always aim at readiness for the outer fight. This involves the management of internal opposition by the ruling stratum in such a fashion that the energies of the nation do not exhaust themselves in party conflicts and treason not be thought of as a last resort. Foreign policy is the ultimate criterion of domestic fitness.

The private and the public aspect of the destiny-idea are symbolized in each culture by a peasantry which is history and a society which makes it and comes to consciousness of itself only against the background of a peasantry. A society

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II p. 369.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II p. 367.

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organizes itself as Estates of which only two have symbolic
significance. Nobility and Priesthood constitute Spengler's
symbols for the antinomy of becoming and being, Destiny and
Causality, Time and Space.

¹ The nobility represents the cosmic, the eternal flow of events, the exclusive validity of the deed. Its educational ideal is training (Zucht), acquired only by living in an environment and a customary ethics which bases itself on its self-evident existence not on its truth.

²

The priesthood serves as the mediator to the enigmatic
and constitutes the symbol of the eternally possible. Its edu-
cation consists of shaping (Bildung), dependant on studies, and
a moral of eternal validity. A ripe nobility exhibits finished
living, the highly developed Priesthood that dignity of bear-
ing which denies mere actuality as unessential. "Celibacy
excludes the priesthood from history and its character indel-
ible from time."

³

The early political organization of feudalism bases
itself on the Estates, its hierarchy of orders viewing the kind
merely as a primus-interparus. The ruler possesses subjects
only in so far as they owe allegiance to a vassal of his. Pri-
vate law serves as the bond of union; a customary ethics,
stresses honor and loyalty. The two sides of property are

1. For an analysis of this inconsistency see post - "Conclusions" the outpouring of a soul.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 341.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 337.

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here united. The Norman conquests, though consequences of a
dynamic world-feeling the outpouring of a soul that felt the
infinite as challenge were nevertheless managed with prudent
calculation typified by the Domesday book of England and the
financial arrangements of Frederick 2nd.

Politics, as every manifestation of existence, Spengler's
scheme exhibits the gradual dominance of waking-consciousness.
The idea emerges that life is not merely to be lived but in-
volves a task as well. The writ that should run through the
whole realm expresses the claim of the State, the care of which
extends to all and in which the Estates represent merely func-
tional parts. This evokes a violent resistance by the old feud-
al orders, subdued only with the aid of the hascent Third
Estate in the First Tyrannis, the time of the Abassids, the
Fronde. After this victory the affinity between Estate and
State, implicit in the ability of a nobility to live an idea
develops into the dynastic state which exhibits a purity of
form that constitutes the maturity of the Culture. Feudal
unity is overcome by national, and the fact of rulership
elevated into the symbol of sovereignty. The Faustian feel-
ing of Care finds its profoundest symbol in the dynasty which
actualizes the unity of a sequence of generations. It produces
Cabinet diplomacy of strict rules and masterly conception, the
very embodiment of action-at-a distance, of a will-to-power
asserting itself in a planned manipulation of force-relations.

1. For discussion of this inconsistency see "Conclusions".

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II, p. 378.

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The development of the nation-state is a symptom of the emerging dominance of the cities. The city spirit is practical, valuing objects by their utility, incapable of living a tradition. The unity of the Third Estate results from its opposition to the political dominance of the nobility. The age of conceptual controversy about liberty begins. Freedom for the emancipated understanding of the city is always freedom "from" something, the ever finer subtilizing of what should be an inner experience. In the Baroque, the First Tyrannies political controversy was the manifestation of the pulse of breeding, but the Third Estate constitutes merely a community of waking-consciousness in the educated, whose numina are systems elaborated with an eye to their inner consistency, without regard to their pertinency.

But "the effects of truths are always different from their tendency". Abstract money appears divorced from the value of the land. Its concern with freedom is merely as a tool for achieving political dominance. It does not ask public opinion but attempts to form it. Its interest is not the franchise but electioneering, not the party-membership but the party machine. The power and booty outlook separate in the nobility, as do cult and learning in the priesthood. The history of all "Late Cultures" exhibits a ceaseless struggle of money against law, of intellect against tradition. But money

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 401.

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belongs to the world of facts, and intellect to the realm-of-truths with the inevitable consequences. "Intellect rejects - money directs" characterizes the last phase of each Culture. The tragic irony of this period resides in the fact that the theorists of freedom are in the final analysis only assisting money to be effective. At the end of this development stands Napoleonism.

Spengler finds in England the laboratory in which both sides of Third-Estate politics, the ideal and the real, graduated. Here the Fronde triumphed and so the bourgoisie could grow up in the strong forms of the First Estate, which disarmed it with its inner superiority and never allowed training to be substituted for breeding in the development of its tradition. Basing its actions on the self-evidence of England's greatness, it substituted the absolutism of class-delegation for the absolutism of the State, which in Britain never attained the symbolism of an inward idea. Its place was taken by "society", as the symbol of the nation being "in form" under the class-regime; a word which in the French rationalists became the vehicle for the expression of their hatred of authority. In England, however, authority was well-defined. It

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 402.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 444.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 392.

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resided in the Parliament, which as a creation of the Baroque embodied the cosmic flow of the Culture's maturity and therefore had music in it. The genealogical principle was represented by the upper stratum of society, which divided itself according to the relative predominance of the power or the booty outlook, into a "respectable" and a "fashionable" party. Though the State's care for all was replaced by a frank assertion of class-interest, the organization of the major parties was such that they represented all effective members of society. The Parliamentary style represented the British equivalent of Cabinet diplomacy.

On the other hand, there never occurred any confusion of the intellectual concepts and practical politics. "The successful utilization of the bourgeois catchwords in politics presupposes the shrewd eye of a ruling class for the intellectual constitution of the stratum which intends to attain power, but will not be capable of wielding it when attained." Consequently in England the generations of "free" opinion was most highly developed by the press and political campaigns as well as Parliament, were systematically managed.

It was different on the Continent. There the two sides of liberalism-freedom from the restrictions of soilbound life,

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol II. p. 403.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 392.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 403.

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freedom of the intellect for all criticism and of money for
any business activity, operated as solvent of all form. There
the distrust of authority felt by the Third-Estate was so
great that it was ready to resure its freedom by means of a
dictatorship. This represents the panic felt by any multi-
tude that no longer feels itself "in condition". The waking-
consciousness of which has so dominated the destiny aspect
that it is ready to salvage its inner cohesiveness by submission
to an authority that would never be tolerated, if legitimate.
This is the essence of the second Tyrannis, of Alexander, of
Napoleon. The self-evident basis for new creativeness has dis-
appeared and naked power becomes the criterion for success.

Out of the depths of the Megalopolis, emerges at this
stage, in Rome, in Paris, a formless mass, that expresses it-
self no longer as mere opposition to traditional values, but
is the very embodiment of nihilistic power - to which various
languages attach equally contemptuous labels: Canaille, Poepel,
Mob. Its influence is out of proportion to its numbers, since
it is always present, forcing its way into the forefront of
events, overshadowing all political activity by its threat.
The bourgeoisie henceforth risks its inner cohesiveness at any
moment, both because of its smaller effective numbers, the ab-
sence of a positive guiding idea and the inferiority of its
determination. The fear of the mass causes a turn by the

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 404.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 405.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 400.

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Third Estate at the beginning of each Civilization to a Con-
stitutional monarchy of which the most extreme form is the
Republic. Here in the Estate-state, the British model could
be copied to advantage.

Two inner contradictions ever harassed the nineteenth
century parliamentary state, however; the genealogical prin-
cipal of such strength, that it saw in the state an embodiment
of a dynasty that no longer existed and the cold intellect
that only recognized the perfect form of government. This
again symbolized the opposition of Time, Space, becoming and
being. "While in England the parties were distinguished by
their possession of different though well-tested modes of
Government, on the Continent the criterion was the direction
towards which the Constitution was to be changed-tradition or
theory." In this contest it was forgotten that foreign policy
is the ultimate standard of inward fitness. The domestic and
diplomatic service developed in opposite directions and the
real victor of the dilemma was abstract money.

This involves the reason for the decay of democracy.
The Third Estate attains political effectiveness as a party, to
which one adheres because of agreement with its conceptual pro-
gram, but to which one does not inwardly belong. Only the
bourgeoisie is "in form" as a party. The aristocracy, though
as a defensive action it may thus constitute itself and

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 414.

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values and does not count and therefore merely adopts liberal methods as a mode of survival. The Marxists, also forced into bourgeois forms exhibit a continual conflict between their will, which is of necessity outside constitutionalism and is defined by Spengler as civil war and its appearance. But the growth of party entails the eventual degeneration into interest groups, the reason for the cohesiveness of the bourgeoisie having disappeared with the elimination of the political eminence of the First Estate. For democracy to work as intended by its theorists requires the almost total absence of interested leadership. Yet a tendency that has once embodied itself in political form not only motivates parties but becomes its tool. "At first parties came into existence for the sake of the program. Then they are held on to defensively as a tool for power and booty. Finally the program is forgotten and the organization exists for its own sake." This Spengler calls Caesarism, the dominance of formless power.

Thus the rights of the people and the influence of the people must be sharply differentiated, according to Spengler. Indeed, the influence of the electorate varies inversely with the degree of universality of the franchise. The people's fundamental right of choosing its own representatives is in practice denied, for

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II p. 461.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II p. 452.

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1. every fully developed organization recruits itself. The effective control of politics reverts to the party leadership, the limit of its capabilities determined by the availability of money. For money emerges as the dominating force in the final stages of democracy. Elections require funds, and public opinion must be made amenable by campaigns. In this phase, free formation of public opinion is impossible. The Press becomes an independent force manipulating minds by the constant repetition of party-slogans, suppressing hostile or financially ineffective criticism by its Conspiracy of Silence and forestalling the possible adverse effects of occasional books by reviewing them.
2.

This is magnified by the particular dynamism of Austrian man, who already in Scholasticism achieved a willed unity that allowed no hostile criticism. This state it ever strives for. The dictatorship of the party-machines supports itself on the Press. Election campaigns become civil wars fought with the ballot. "To preserve the form even if it contradicts the advantage", forms the theoretical basis of democracy, but this is exactly what the non-Estate finds itself incapable of doing. Gradually the feeling grows that the Constitution contains no effective guarantees and the rights that the Grandparents died for, cease to be meaningful to the descendants. People become tired of the gleaming concepts and turn to the release afforded

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 456.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 461.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 416.

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by the Second Religiousness. The political form-world has
been thought to completion, and Destiny begins to reassert
itself over dogmatic causality. The West has produced no pol-
itical theorist with an ability to reach the souls since Marx.
Democracy then represents not a summit of achievement but an
inevitable stage on the road from Napoleonism to that of
Caesarism, which for the last time concentrates in itself all
that remains of blood, of dynastic feeling, of the idea of the
State.

The period of Caesarism is preceded by an age of gigan-
tic conflict, the "period of Contending States" lasting from
Alexander to Ceasar in the Classical and beginning with Napo-
leon in the West. This epoch exhibits in the crassest shape
the opposition between the great form and the great individ-
ual. The loss of the felt relation to the cosmic beat opens
opportunities for private individuals who will have power at
any price and who as embodiments of force can shape the destiny
of a Culture. The great tradition, which made genius dispens-
able, there is replaced by great fact-men, whose accidental
appearance can elevate an era into an epoch and whose death
2
can cause the total collapse of all their enterprise. To be
sure, the transition period from the Culture to the Civiliza-
tion also had its phenomena of pure force-Napoleon or Alexander.

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 418.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 418.

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But there was always the strong tradition of the Baroque at its back and the pulse of being had not yet completely died out. The Culture had bound up all forces in a strict form. But with the appearance of Napoleonism, they were released - and in time Nature broke forth. Cabinet diplomacy had been conducted within definite rules. The wars of the 18th century consisted of the maneuvers of small armies under well-understood conditions. But the era preceding Caesarism replaces the absolute state with a battling society of states. This is the dawn of the great individual beginning in the Classical with Hannibal and in the West with the World War.

Wars become ever more violent and uncompromising. Until the beginning of civilization the technique of War had always been subsidiary to the development of craftsmanship. But now the requirements of continuous war or potential war require the subservience of all mechanical means to instruments of destruction and largely condition technical progress by its assumed fitness for military operations. Universal military service, mass-charges dominate battles that would to contemporaries of Frederick the Great have appeared madness.

The ruthlessness of the peace-conditions matches the expenditure of force. Starting with Napoleon the conventions of 18th century warfare began to be violated. Only the physical restrictions tend to limit the exploitation of military

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 420.

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1. The Treaty of Versailles deliberately avoided final conditions of peace, enabling the victors to modify their demands with the changing-situation.
2.

Imperialism is the inevitable product of Civilization an outward thrust to hide the inner void. After the formlessness of the early conflicts, the most self-assured power, emerges as the dominating force. The vacuum created by the collapse of all inner meaning has such strength that it does not matter whether a people wills to assume this role. It is seized and pushed into it. Rome did not conquer its Empire, it condensed itself into that form and despite Scipio's awareness of the dangers Rome could not escape its destiny. So it will be with the West. The power centers will become ever fewer, the tensions ever greater, the wars more violent. The great focus of power will decide the fate of continents until Caesarism in its political form will supervene and life gradually slip back into biological periods.

In the souls of the people, arises at this stage a great desire for peace. Every civilization knows the cry for reconciliation and universal understanding. But the logic of the age of Caesarism will not allow it. "The Hague Conference of 1907 was a prelude to the World War; the Washington Conference of 1922 will have been that of others." A civilization

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 422.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 422.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 430.

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does not permit a people to choose its mode of life, judging
it by its fitness for the struggle. In this task whatever re-
mains of old traditions, representing the organic factors,
such as the U.S. constitution, acquires tremendous force and
1
can bring about historical results of great magnitude.

Money at the beginning of this period permeated public
life. Economics, the activity which belongs to the spindle-
side of being, its mere preserving aspects, is the primary
mode of thought in the young Cosmopolis. Ethics becomes social-
engineering. "Property is theft" representing the ultra-material-
istic conception of the thought: "What shall it profit a man
if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul." 2 But
money is merely a form of thought, ordering all activity with
reference to itself. Like all problems of the Culture it will
reach a state of absolute inner finishedness, no matter how
powerful its present manifestations. The dynamic economics
of the Faustian Culture, symbolized by double-entry bookkeeping,
a pure spatial analysis of an economic condition and in which
3
the true values are production and work not as mistakenly
4
assumed gold, has reached the limit of its inner possibilities.
Just as at the time of Diocletian, thinking in terms of money

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 430.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 344.

3. Written in 1918.

4. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 493.

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will gradually cease and the force of law, the power aspect
of becoming triumph over the mere acquisitive side.
1

This, Spengler believes, may be the fate, too, of that
prime-symbol of the West, the Machine. No other Culture has
constructed its relationship to the macrocosm, in such master-
ful fashion, or achieved such a thoroughgoing revision of its
environment. The working-hypothesis ever exhibits the Faustian
attitude towards the universe. Work and deed are the great
ethical concepts of this Culture, Kant's categorical impera-
tive a command of activity. But technical knowledge will be
of no avail, to a soul that has lost its meaning. If the best
young minds of the future will no longer see life's purpose in
practical pursuit and withdraw into mysticism, if the succeed-
ing generations become obsessed with the Satanism of their
creations, then nothing can stop the decay of this prime symbol,
a creation of the intellect and not of pure labor as Marx
supposed.
2

This will be the stage of pure Caesarism, the formless
force, which whatever its outward trappings will depend on the
personal power of its possessor. The huge citizen-militia is
replaced by the chief's followings, private armies whose des-
tinies depend on their leaders as in the time of Caesar, Pompey
and Octavian. The real focus of events becomes the Megalopolis
in which wars of infinite bloodiness because of their private

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 196.

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nature herald the beginning of the final contest for power.
The victorious Caesarism will then constitute the last attempt
by the powers of the blood, doomed to petrification because
the fire in the soul of the Civilization has long died out.
Its outward manifestations are mere appearance. People's
rights take the place of the scepter and crown in constitu-
tional monarchy. They are carefully paraded for the multitudes
to hide their total lack of real meaning. With power without
tradition as its last manifestation, with waking-consciousness
defeated by itself, the Civilization turns itself into a fellah
state where time is meaningless, and history at an end:

"And so the drama of a high culture-that wondrous
world of deities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities - closes
with the return of the pristine facts of the blood eternal
that is one and the same as the ever-circling cosmic flow.
The bright imaginative Waking-Being submerges itself into the
silent service of Being, as the Chinese and Roman empires tell
us. Time triumphs over Space, and it is Time whose inexorable
movement embeds the ephemeral incident of the Culture, on this
planet, in the incident of man - a form wherein the incident
life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming
horizons of geological and stellar histories pile up in the
light-world of our eyes.

"For us, however, whom a Destiny has placed in this
Culture and at this moment of its development - the moment when
money is celebrating its last victories, and the Caesarism that

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Is to succeed approaches with quiet, firm step - our direction,
willed and obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow
limits, and on any other terms life is not worth the living.
We have not the freedom to reach to this or to that, but the
freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing. And a task that
historic necessity has set will be accomplished with the indiv-
idual or against him."

Spengler's metaphysical dilemma permeats his political
theory, which contains many similarities with the Platonic con-
ception of degeneration as the consequence of a loss of tradi-
tion and the dominance of selfishness. The Estates represent
the quintessence of creativity embodying breed and training
and thereby become the foci of world-history. Yet just how is
this creativity accomplished? The Nobility symbolizes pure
becoming and the Priesthood typifies waking-consciousness.
Since the essence of the former is comprised in living a des-
tiny and that of the latter in confining itself to the world
as eternally possible expressed by a withdrawal from history,
it is difficult to see what constitutes Spengler's criterion
for ascribing equal symbolic significance to their appearance
as estates. If the Nobility does nothing but live a destiny
it cannot be creative. If the Priesthood represents mere waking-
consciousness it does not possess any characteristic symbolism.

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 507.

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Again, if religion is a construction of waking-consciousness one should expect its early manifestations to be hesitant, uncertain of themselves, attaining ever greater mastery of form with the emancipation of the waking-consciousness in the development of the Culture. In fact, exactly the opposite is true in Spengler's scheme. The period of greatest religious creative force occurs at the beginning of the Culture and Caesarism finds religion just as all other problemation devoid of any symbolic significance.

The nobility as the prime estate appears unable by itself to achieve that inner purposiveness which Spengler considers the outstanding characteristic of the State. Indeed the State comes into existence only over its opposition. If the symbolism of the state finds its expression in an idea, which transcends mere becoming, it seems evident that this idea is a function of waking-consciousness not of an immanent destiny. Moreover, as Spengler points out, the Magian cultures articulate themselves almost exclusively through the symbolism of a Priesthood, with the nobility playing a subsidiary role.

The conclusion appears again, despite many striking insights, that the strict separation of becoming and being into a postulate of alternatives has no standing in reality. Both are merely tendencies, the relative predominance of which, characterizes modes of world-experience.

Purposiveness without an organic framework is meaningless.

1. See post Ch. "The Sense of Responsibility".

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Pure existence describes an animal state. All creativity requires waking-consciousness, but effective leadership will take into account the unconscious factors of motivation. It must be admitted that in many respects Spengler acknowledges this.

1. In the chapter on mathematics, he explicitly affirms the inter-relationship. The confrontation of Pilate and Christ, of profound and compelling beauty, contains a poetic implication not only of the opposition but also the connection of these aspects of life. But ever the temptation to shock and the approach to history as a machine perpetually reproducing new manifestations of power, which man is impotent to influence, gains the upper hand and leads to the elaboration of the opposition between Time and Space, Destiny and Causality, the World-as-History and the World-as-Nature.

"Luther was the creation, not of intellectual necessity but of destiny." It would be better to say that destiny embodies itself in intellectual necessity. Political conduct reveals not just an inexorable immanence but a process of becoming consciously evaluated. Luther was consequently more than the creation of historical necessity, but the shaper of a tendency, the inspiration of a dimly felt longing. Life reveals not merely activity, but purposeful activity. Politics is not a simple problem of living the organic immanence, but of recognizing the possibilities of the situation. This recognition,

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 54.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 295.

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## Conclusions

Spengler's philosophy of history reveals all the implications of his metaphysical assumptions. The forms of the great Cultures emerge out of the stream of nameless humanity, their whole life an effort to actualize their immanence. The directedness of existence, the experience of destiny, soon come into conflict with waking-consciousness, however. Stifled by a rationalism that recognizes no mysteries, ideation in the great style ceases. In religion, in politics, in art, formlessness rules a humanity which can find refuge from the tensions in its soul only in mystery cults, in panem et circenses and in silent resignation to political Caesarism. As the cosmic beat gradually decreases the Culture turns itself into a Civilization amidst a series of cataclysmic wars. Finally, with waking-consciousness defeated by itself, the powers of the blood reassert themselves, life reverts to the fellah state of creative impotence, the Civilization petrifies and dies.

Despite the poetic imaginativeness of this philosophy and its many startlingly accurate predictions, our analysis has revealed serious difficulties. The opposition between waking-consciousness and becoming, between Time and Space, History and Causality expresses, but does not resolve, the dilemma of the experience of freedom in a determined environment. Spengler believes that history reveals an inexorable destiny, its triumphs the consequence of an almost unconscious participation in the process of becoming. But much of his data disproves these

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contentions. If each culture constructs its own image of the
world and spends its existence in an attempt to actualize it,
then the biological sequence of generations attains symbolism
only through an inward experience. But since experiences are
unique and necessity can govern only the general, we find that
the specificity of each culture is a function of freedom, not
a blindly-working organic immanence. Destiny requires waking-
consciousness to actualize its possibilities.

On the other hand, if the life of each culture represents
an effort to actualize its prime-symbol, one would expect the
historical development of the culture to vary as much as their
symbolism. Spengler, however, has postulated an identical pol-
itical institutionalization at comparable stages of existence.
This leads to the conclusion, that the cultures may not repres-
ent as self-contained organisms as Spengler suggests. The very
possibility of making an analysis of another Culture's soul
indicates, moreover, a degree of inner relationship compounded
by the fact that Spengler seriously examines only the Faustian,
Appollinian and Magian Cultures.

Spengler's denial of the interrelationship of Cultures
and their inability to ever understand each other's symbols is
thus refuted by his approach. If the symbols of another Culture
must always remain inwardly remote, it is difficult to see what
governs the continuation of any ideation. If, however, most

1. For more complete analysis see ante discussion at end of previous section.

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Cultures begin by taking over foreign symbols then it can hardly be asserted that these forms did not condition their users. Though Christianity may have been adapted to fit the needs of the Faus-tian soul, the whole history of the West was permeated by the particular spirituality of this well-organized institution, with its heritage of the Greeco-Roman tradition. The infusion of new meaning into old forms involves a different process than spontaneous creativity.

Spengler's political theory contains similar inconsistencies. It proved impossible to reconcile the metaphysical postulate of alternative modes of behavior with a political symbolism expressed in Estates. The nobility as the representative of an inexorable destiny appears to have no scope for creativity and the Priesthood, as the exponent of pure waking-consciousness lacks symbolism. ¹ Spengler's difficulty derives from the resolution of tendencies whose relative predominance characterizes modes of world-experience into incompatible alternatives. He forgot that the World-as-History and the World-as-Nature are merely symbolic representations of possible apprehensions of reality, not objective attributes of existence. History and Causality represent types of analysis concerned respectively with noumenal and phenomenal occurrences. This does not prove their opposition, however. It merely indicates levels of

1. These arguments are presented at considerably greater length at the end of the respective chapters.

2. See post Ch. History and Man's Experience of Morality for Complete analysis.

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meaning for events which can be understood only as a unity, as
destiny purposively evaluated, as history consciously lived.

Purely analytical criticism of Spengler will, however,
never discover the profounder levels of his philosophy. These
reside in his evocation of those elements of life that will ever
be the subject of an inner experience, in his intuition of a
mystic relationship to the infinite that expresses personality.
Spengler's vision encompassed an approach to history which -
whatever our opinion of his conclusions-transcended the mere
causal analysis of data and the shallow dogmatism of many pro-
gress theories. No discussion of internal structure can inval-
idate the force of Spengler's description of Christ's journey to
Jerusalem or the dramatic quality of the exposition of the dilemma
in Michelangelo's soul. After all has been said, the conviction
remains that Spengler has found a poetry in life which rises
the/
above barren systematization of its manifestations.

To be sure, such an approach presents dangers. The
latent anti-intellectualism may well lead to a cult of sheer

1. In any philosophical discussion one must sharply distinguish the philosophical assumptions from their argument. A refutation of the latter may merely mean that the metaphysical postulates are capable of stronger supporting formulation. Logic can aid in evaluating internal consistency and relevance but is no test for the metaphysical assumptions which can be analyzed only by utilizing another set of assumptions, not an objective standard of validity. It is possible, therefore, to offer different explanations for all of Spengler's symbols of soul-images without refuting the concept of the soul of a culture. (See Appendix A - The Concepts of Meaning).

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power, of which recent history has seen many examples. But the fact that certain arguments if pressed to an extremity involve unacceptable consequences does not necessarily disprove their validity. It indicates rather that in the ultimate problems of life Man must find the sanction for his conduct within himself, not in technical solutions. Every event is not merely an effect but also an experience. As an effect it is subject to causal determination; as an experience it contains the meaning of freedom and the essence of personality. This accounts for the unsatisfactoriness of ethical systems such as Northrop's, who conceives values as approachable by mere methodology. It was not, after all, Spinoza's geometrical method that led to his ethical concepts but his inner attitude which a priori directed the method.

It was Spengler's merit that he understood this, as well as the underlying unity of all manifestations of human endeavor, though his poetic imagination caused him to overvalue the realm of necessity and underestimate the purposive element. Perhaps the most serious criticism to be made against Spengler consists

1. Dante has illustrated, in perhaps the only way possible, the interdependence of reason and inner experience, causality and grace. On the climb to the top of Mount Purgatory, he has absorbed the essence of human wisdom. Henceforth only an inner experience can conduct him. When Beatrice appears he turns for guidance to Virgil, but reason is here powerless. Just as Plato's Idea of the Good, just as Kant's experience of freedom, the final attainment of human transcendence, is a matter of inner illumination not technical manipulation. See post for full development of this idea. Ch. "The Sense of Responsibility".

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of his uneasy swaying between the world-as-experience, which is the only approach to an apprehension of purposiveness and his vision of it as mere repetition of power-phenomena. He constantly stresses the uniqueness of experience and yet finds in history no more than the generality of phenomena. The totality of man's longing can not, however, achieve a sanction through a mere cataloguing of appearances, but must attain meaning through the specific in Man's experiences. Spengler attempts to resolve these difficulties by his emphasis on the historical rather than the moral aspects of existence. He is ever concerned with an evaluation of the elements of success, which really represents a manifestation of a will-to-system from a pragmatic rather than an ethical point-of-view. This emphasis on success leads to that strict separation of History and Causality, of which the person of Christ constitutes not a proof but a contradiction. But no truth is without its historical tendency and every effective conduct implies some normative element.

1. See foot note Vol. II. p. 216. "The method of the present work is historical. It therefore recognizes the historical, as well as the anti-historical as a fact. The religious method on the other hand looks upon itself as true and the opposite as false. The difference is quite insuperable."

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What else is the meaning of Canossa, where not
even dire political necessity availed to turn away a sup-
plicant supported by dogma, but who was reduced to that
position, at least in part, by the very strength of the
moral sanction of the church?

On the other hand, Spengler's attempted pragmatism makes the charge of Pessimism largely inapplicable. Pessimism in the ethical sense implies the existence of standards. Spengler, however, makes no more claim to embodying moral principles in his analysis of politics than Machiavelli. On the contrary, again like Machiavelli, one can easily detect a preference for the lived metaphysics of an earlier time, when longing and life embodied itself in more virile forms. Spengler conceives himself in the role of a physician, who by informing a patient of the incurability of cancer, does not advocate it as a way-of-life.

1. The problem might be raised whether pessimism is not the condition for ethical progress. Certainly the assumption that this is the best of all possible world does not lend itself to an attitude of positive morality.

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To be sure, an acceptance of his conclusions and the
recognition of the transitoriness of existence, may well lead
to a kismetic resignation or a complete unconcern with any-
thing except material conditions of success. But this is only
one tendency implicit in Spengler. Its acceptance constitutes
the revelation of a personality rather than an invalidation
of Spengler's position. No necessary connection exists be-
tween permanence of existence and moral conduct in the his-
torical realm, any more than in private life. Ethics can not
be derived from a purposiveness of the universe revealed in
phenomenal appearances. That certainty of action is not given
to man. On the other hand, the recognition of limits, that
one is man and not God, may in nations, as in individuals,
serve as the basis for ethical criteria and the concept of
the moral personality of man.

Spengler states at one point that the West is composed
of Kantians who do not know how Kantian they are. It is cer-
tain that he, too, has followed Kant's position to its ultim-
ate conclusion. All phenomenal appearance requires for its
cognition not only forms imposed by the human mind, but those
very forms are functions of particular cultures. They do not exhaust

1. See post Chapter "History and Man's Experience of Morality", Ch. "The Sense of Responsibility" for full development.

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themselves in establishing patterns of phenomenal knowledge,
but include all manifestations of human activity, including
those numina specifically excepted by Kant: our knowledge of God,
freedom, immortality and morality.

If Kant conditioned all subsequent metaphysics it is
certain that Hegel is immanent in most of the philosophy of
history, no matter how passionate the denial. His concept of
history as the manifestation of the idea in time and Nature as
the representation of the spirit in Space was adopted by Speng-
ler with but minor modifications. The destiny that is our ex-
perience of history differs neither in its inward necessity nor
in anything more essential than formulation from the self-real-
ization of the Spirit. For Hegel's rationality was not, after
all, Kant's pure reason but had as its ultimate criterion actual-
ity.

Darwin, too, be he ever so derided, is implicit in much
of Spengler. The theory of evolution may well be no more than
a working hypothesis, particularly adapted to the mentality of
19th century England and logically replaceable by a catastrophe
concept. Nevertheless, its primary test of physical survival
is repeated by Spengler as the criterion of fitness in his
World-as-History.

1. Hegel - The Philosophy of History p. 72.

2. Spengler's striking counterpart is Vico's philosophy of history, which however is never mentioned in "The Decline of the West". Vico, too, saw in history a cyclical recurrence of civilizations, their growth exhibiting discrete phases of activity. The occult wisdom of the early stage bases itself on a religious experience. But as the mystery of life disappears, reason becomes dominant. The philosophical wisdom of the Culture's maturity expresses the claims of a rationality fully conscious of its power. No stage of development can be maintained, however. The necessary realization of a Culture's immance follows an inevitable pattern. Vico is thus the modern precursor of a systematic cyclical theory of history.

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Scholarly criticism of Spengler has been sporadic and frequently besides the point. Sabine's brief summary is a tirade and not an analysis. V. S. Yarros confines himself to characterizing Spengler as the apostle of the new pessimism citing in opposition the "progress" achieved in social legislation and political liberty by Western man. The article suffers from having been written on the eve of the most demoniac outburst of the "progressive" West.

The most profound analysis is probably that of Eduard Meyer, who, though accepting many of Spengler's conclusions, opposes to the concept of the organic culture of definite extends and fixed duration, that of overlapping culture-circles, whose capability of absorbing alien influences as well as their possibility of different development is manifold and whose decline is a result not a cause of excessive involvement in imperialistic ventures. Thus a purposive element of choice is imported into Spengler's development, its fatedness the result, at least in part, of human volition.

Is Spengler a determinist? This question is not as absurd as might appear from a cursory reading of his philosophy.

1. Sabine - Western Political Thought p. 705.

2. Open Court Vol. 47; 253, p. 8 June 1933.

3. Schroeter - "Der Streit um Spengler" presents primarily an analysis of conflicting points of view.

4. Eduard Meyer - Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes - Curtis Verlag, Berlin.

5. Though, of course, it can be argued that this volition is itself a function of destiny.

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Determinism is, after all, a flexible concept. Freedom can never mean unlimited choice, nor determinism plantlike dependence. Any manifestation of the problems of necessity and freedom, constitutes a question of the relative weight of tendencies rather than a crass assertion of incompatibles. Spengler took this into account, though his enthusiasm leads to a formulation that seems to negate his theoretical awareness. Incident and destiny are the differentia which represent the opposition. The historical direction which is fixed and unalterable, inescapable as death-constitutes Destiny. Its embodiment in actuality, however, depends on Incident. It was an Incident that Columbus discovered America as the agent of the Spanish rather than the French throne and that thereby the style of politics of the next centuries was set by Madrid instead of Paris. But it was a destiny, that the late period of the West should accomplish itself through absolutism to a Revolution. That this revolution occurred in France was an Incident, but it was a Destiny that Napoleonism should accompany the turn of the culture into a civilization. There are personal Incidents when a great man such as Napoleon concentrates the whole meaning of an epoch in himself and thereby accomplishes in a few years, what under the impersonal Incident of an epoch it took the Classical decades to achieve. The inner logic of events is fixed, the general tendencies of the development determined, but

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 139 et seq.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 149.

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its incidental appearance is the result of the self-assurance
and the work of people who can live a destiny rather than suf-
fer it.

This leads to the dilemma inherent in all philosophy
of history that stresses the organic aspect as a postulate of
action: the connection between the necessary and the possible.
It is a problem which Kant too considered and failed to solve
completely. In order to establish the validity of his cate-
gorical imperative as a foundation of eternal peace, Kant was
forced to demonstrate the possibility of its application. But
his proof of feasibility became a dictum of necessity and seems
to negate the moral basis of the categorical imperative.

Similarly Spengler concluded by posing the alterna-
tives of doing the necessary or doing nothing. Yet this is
the description of a psychological state rather than a guide
to action. Just as the pleasure principle in psychology it
ascribes a definitional motivation to past action but is total-
ly useless as a standard for the prediction of future

1. This refutes the argument that Spengler's later work "The House of Decision" represents a logical inconsistency. He merely describes in that book the possible lines of actions open to the Western Culture in its present stage of development.

2. See post. Ch. History and Man's Experience of Morality.

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1. Man may ever desire to do the necessary or pleasurable, if in varying the fields of activity and though the emphasis may be on either the moral or material aspect of life. However, not the postulate of necessity but the content ascribed to it constitutes the real criterion for motivated activity. Spengler's only standard for a necessary action is its success. Apart from the fact that this represents no aid whatever in the really crucial personal or political decisions - for what makes them problematical is the existence of difficult alternatives - he offers no standard for what he means by success. Christ died on the Cross and his mission to Jerusalem was a miserable momentary failure. Was his action, therefore historically unnecessary? Huss was burned in Constance and Luther split the Church. Whose action embodied necessity? Was Luther possible without Huss? Some day, Protestant Christianity may disappear

1. The difficulty of the pleasure principle derives from the hedonistic implications of the word in everyday language. For what is really meant by the pleasure principle? The psychologist counters arguments that most persons are incapable of striking a rational balance between various possible sources of satisfaction with an assertion of the unconscious factor of motivation. Since it is a fact that many persons commit acts which are actually painful, the psychologist finds refuge in a balance of greater and lesser pain. But what he is really saying is that every action must have a preponderance of motives for its performance and he is thus describing motivated activity - if not merely activity - not pleasure. Of course, a scientist has a perfect right to adopt any definition suitable (see Appendix A) provided that he stays within the conventional meaning of his terms. Moreover the equating of pleasure and motive is really no help at all for it merely shifts the main problem from a definition of motive to a definition of pleasure. It is never clear whether actions result from pleasure or whether pleasure is that form which actions result and in the final analysis both conceptions must be used. The same argument holds for the "necessity concept."

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from the face of the earth. Will that reduce Luther to a meaningless Incident? Moreover, since history is itself a function of the soul-image of a Culture and its awareness a result of its symbolism, it appears that Destiny and Incident, necessary and accidental are merely transitory manifestations of a particular depth-experience and not applicable as a guide to activity.

Two misconceptions seem to be involved in the problem of necessity as a sanction of conduct: a confusion of the doer and the action, and of the intent with the tendency. No activity can in retrospect be proved to have resulted from free will—the fact of action indicating a preponderance of factors on one side. In this view all actions are determined. On the other hand only deeds embodying the logic of history are necessary. How can one reconcile this dilemma?

The intent and the tendency of historical figure are radically different, as Spengler frequently points out. Of what use then is a rule to do the necessary? Wherein lies the mystery of results totally incommensurable with intention and yet dependent for their appearance on such willed activity?

The greater the interval between the event and the analysis, the more determined does the act appear, as Tolstói already emphasized. With the passage of time, all the manifold possibilities that accompanied performance are forgotten and only the

1. Tolstói - War and Peace - Epilogue.

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action remains, a testimony to its irrevocability. Man, despite Hume, can never imagine anything totally out of his frame of reference and the detailed historical development that might have ensued, if, for example Richileu had not interfered in the 30-years war, is beyond the scope of even the most poetic historian.

Undoubtedly, the frustrated soul of a suddenly traditional Germany in the 1920's cried out for something to hold on to. But none of Hitler's lieutenants, as evidence abundantly shows, could have unleashed the demoniac forces that were eventually produced by the Fuehrer. Yet Hitler's fate hung on a thread many times. Ever some little incident saved him, always in the minds of the chief actors there existed meaningful alternatives. Whatever our view of the necessity of these events today, the key question is in how far necessity could have served either as a guide to action or for the prediction of events in 1933. Similarly Spengler's analysis of the British political development contains many challenging observations. He has not explained, however, why it was the Pronde and not the State which triumphed in the 17th century.

This demonstrates the essential characteristic of historical necessity. No matter what we may think of its compelling quality, it ever appears to man in the guise of freedom. There always seem to exist alternatives, between which one can

1. See Gisevius - To the Bitter End. Vol. II. Chapter 1.

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choose, and without such alternatives life would be unthinkable.

This is perhaps the profoundest meaning of the union of the
categorical imperative with historical necessity in Kant. Necess-
ity, as a guide to action is useless, even for a pragmatist.
The number of historical figures who died believing themselves
to have failed, and yet represented the future of their culture
is legion, as is the number of those whose pinnacle of temper-
ary success merely served to hide the historical hollowness of
their position.

The question of conceptual historical necessity can be
safely left unsettled then for it is prejudged by our experience
of freedom. Freedom is not a definitional quantity, but an
inner experience of life as a process of deciding meaningful
alternatives. This, it must be repeated, does not mean unlimited
choice. Everybody is a product of an age, a nation, and environ-
ment. But, beyond that, he constitutes what is essentially un-
approachable by analysis, the form of the form, the creative
essence of history, the moral personality. However we may ex-
plain actions in retrospect, their accomplishment occurred with
the inner conviction of choice.

This is not to say that Spengler's view of the develop-
ment of the culture through youth, maturity, to decline and
death is without merit. To life belongs death, in history, as

1. This, however, can not serve as the ultimate reconciliation of this inconsistency in Kant. See post Ch IV "History and Man's Experience of Morality."

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in individuals. No culture has yet been permanent, no striving completely fulfilled. It is not given to man to choose his age, or to the statesman the condition of his time. But the form taken by the particular period, the meaning given to life is the task of each generation. Man can find the sanction for his actions only within himself, not in the discovery of purposes in phenomena. It is a responsibility correctly seen by Kant as a duty since even inactivity postulates an absolute norm.

And so we come to the final problem in Spengler that of Youth and Age. Can one ascribe organic periods to Cultures? In how far is the analogy to organic experience valid? It seems certain that to man the problem of age is closely tied to a physiological state. After a certain period of life the knowledge of a limit becomes ever more definite, the inexorability of development in the light of one's past inevitable. The knowledge of the transitoriness of existence is responsible for much consistency in action, and gives rise to the tragedy of the man who must live out an essentially meaningless belief, only to

1. On this point see also Schweitzer "The Philosophy of Civil-ization" p. 271 et seq.

2. For full discussion of these generalities see post Ch. "The Sense of Responsibility".

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give content to his past. This is the drama of Rubashov in "Darkness at Noon", and of Ivan Karamazoff who confesses, not indeed because he committed the murder, but because the crime was implicit in his previous life, which could acquire meaning only through this sacrifice.

Yet age is not exclusively a physiological state. Life exhibits an eternal recurrence of problems, the settlement of each conditioning and weakening the ability to respond to others.

It is a dilemma in which abstract argument can not go much further. The physiological analogy is not tenable with cultures, yet the existence of civilizations may be conceived as a succession of dilemmas. Toynbee correctly analyzed the challenge and response element, but turned it into a mechanistic method for material salvation. It appears, that the solution of each problem takes away something of the ability to experience its inner meaning, gradually lessening the intensity of the response. The League of Nations was a dream, the United Nations is merely a technical clearing house, perhaps therefore of longer duration as its inner idea is dissipated. Ageing in a Culture may well be the gradual solution of the problems immanent in its existence, their death a form of disenchantment.

Abstract argument can give no aid, because the fact of existence forces a position towards life regardless of the state of the Culture in which one lives and because the very certainty of

1. See post Ch. IV. The Sense of Responsibility for limitation of a theory of action, which attempts to derive its attainability from phenomenal reality.

2. See post. "The Sense of Responsibility" for Development of this Concept.

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transitoriness can enable man to give a meaning to his existence.

All the Cultures Spengler treats have disintegrated. It
is of no avail to charge pessimism. Immortality can not be
achieved by postulate. But behind the physical decay that seems
the lot of everything existing emerges a level of meaning which
embodies a type of attainable permanence. In its death each
Culture bequeathed forms to the successor which, whatever Speng-
ler's assertion, were the condition precedent to all subsequent
problemation and the foundation of future greatness.

Mommsen has stated it well: "We are faced with the end
of the Roman Republic. For half a millenium we observed her
ruling the countries of the Mediterranean. We have seen her
collapse in politics, in morals, in religion and in literature,
not through the violence of external events, but through a
gradual inward decay. The world which Caesar found, contained
much of the noble heritage of past centuries and an infinite
abundance of pomp and glory, but little spirit, still less taste.
Above all, the joy had gone out of life. It was indeed an old
world; not to be made young again even by the genius of Caesar's
patriotism. The serenity of the dawn can not return until dark-
ness has set in and night has reigned supreme. But nevertheless
he brought to the sorely harrassed peoples on the Mediterranean
a tolerable evening after the sultry noon. And when in good
time, after long historical night, the day of new peoples dawned
again and young nations in free self-fulfillment began to move
towards new and higher goals, there were among them quite a few

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in which the seed strewn by Caesar had born fruit and which owed him, as they still do, the distinctive character of their nationality."

Perhaps this is the only immortality a Culture has a right to require.

Thus Spengler's philosophy of history, with its challenging intuitions and broad vistas represents an attempt at the resolution of the enigmas of existence. He clearly realized the necessity of an explicit metaphysical foundation for the apprehension of History-as-an-Intuition.

Though his philosophical assumptions do not always stand up under analytical criticism, and though alternative interpretations can be offered for some of his data, Spengler's poetic imagination pointed the way towards insights of profound and compelling beauty. The world-as-experience represents a construction which takes full cognizance of the organic factors of existence. There is considerable merit in his articulation of the two possible modes of cognition and existence, Destiny and Causality, Time and Space. The interdependence of religion and natural science constitutes a poetic vision of great depth. However, Destiny can not merely consist of vegetation and all activity implies purposes. No mere assertion of necessity can relieve

1. Theodore Mommsen - The History of Rome - Vol. VI p. 614. (German edition - Verlag der Weidmannschen Buchhandlung). My translation.

a Culture from the responsibility giving own meaning to its own
1
existence. Whatever the tragedy of life, its content constitutes
the creation of an individual soul, the reaction to its imman-
ence contains the essence of personality.

Spengler thought that he had resolved this problem by
a postulation of alternatives. But at each aspect of his phil-
osophical exposition, this dilemma has accounted for lack of
consistency and inability to account for a wide range of phen-
omena. It is strange that a Transcendentalist should have found
no deeper meaning in history than its mere manifestations.

And so the poetic beauty of Spengler's psychology pre-
sents a challenge for other minds and new approaches. The
dilemma of the relation of necessity and freedom remains, to
guide our quest for the meaning of history, the purpose of life.

1. See post Ch. "The Sense of Responsibility". Also Appendix
A "The Concept of Meaning."

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## Introduction

Toynbee attempted to transcend Spengler's metaphysical limitations by an assertion of purposiveness. He argued that history did not reveal an organic process, continuously and inevitably reproducing new manifestations of power but a willed development of responsive growth, its fatality a testimony to man's failure, not to a tragedy of unavoidable death.

History, in Toynbee's scheme, exhibits a constant alternation of dynamic creativity and static torpor. The embodiments of activity are civilizations, beings of "the highest order and self-contained", which alone constitute "intelligible fields of study." They do not represent organic entities with determined life-spans, but merely a relation, the common field of action of their component political communities. Their life presents a succession of problems, each a challenge to undergo an ordeal. If the successful response creates an overbalance which in turn presents itself as a challenge, then the civilization grows through a dynamic rhythm of continuous problemation.

This is accomplished under the guidance of a minority which leads the uncreative majority by mimesis, a social drill, and the charm of its inspiration. Yet creativity contains its own nemesis in an idolatry of past successes and mimesis is doomed to break down because of its mechanicalness. The creative

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 45.

2. Toynbee op. cit. A Study of History Vol. I. p. 57.

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minority, sensing the rift in society, turns itself into a dominant minority and rules by force. The uncreative majority and the barbarians beyond the borders secede, forming the internal and external proletariat. The rift in the body social parallels a schism in the soul from the tensions of which a universal state appears the immediate solution. But an unsuccessful series of responses has doomed the civilization. Its inner meaning is, however, salvaged by the higher religion which the internal proletariat creates on the ruins of the collapsing universal state. After a violent interregnum the universal church becomes the chrysalis from which a new society may spring by the process of appellation-and-affiliation.

The approach of the study which bases itself on "the well-beloved method of making an empirical survey" leads Toynbee into inner contradictions. An empiricist will always be faced with the validation of those normative concepts, for which history offers no necessary proof, and phenomena no universal rule. The formulation of historical laws implies a conception of necessity, not to be evaded by a mere postulation of purposiveness. Against a background of twenty-one civilations that either have collapsed or exhibit all the symptoms of decay, challenge-and-response, with its accompanying doctrines of

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol IV. p. 261

2. As Kant shows.

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withdrawal-and-return becomes not a negation of inevitability,
but its mechanistic description. Moreover, an empirical sur-
vey has a tendency to consider mere surface phenomena as equi-
valent, since the inner interpretative meaning must constitute
a metaphysical resolution.

Toynbee compounds this by imposing a normative pattern
on a comparative study of civilizations, all of which are con-
ceived as philosophically contemporary and functionally equiva-
lent. A Platonic identification of political action with ap-
propriate types of souls results and an affirmation of a supra-
mandane plane of history that embodies the true fulfillment of
existence.

It will be our task to analyze the validity of an at-
tempt at finding solutions to problems of inner experience in
the causal manifestations of life. We must determine the degree
of reality that can be ascribed to analogies from mythology or
the New Testament. This will bring us face to face with our
basic enigma: Does history or life exhibit a master-plan the
understanding of which offers a key to the dilemmas in our
souls or does the solution reside in an inner reconciliation?
Must we look outside or inside ourselves for a motive force to
apprehend the essence of history as a guide to action? Can
a metaphysical pattern be utilized in a study that professes
to find its proof in the first instance in empirical data?

1. See post Appendix A "The Concepts of. Meaning".

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1
Metaphysics.

Every philosophy of history must sooner or later face
the problem of what constitutes the motive-force of directed
life. Spengler had opted for an organic immanence that ruled
all happenings. Toynbee could not face the dilemma in this
form. He argued that life presented a series of challenges,
the response to which revealed a personality and whose solution
was therefore unpredictable. Yet this assertion of freedom
clashed with his empirical data that indicated almost certain
decay for each civilization.

Toynbee tried to solve this difficulty by considering
history as the realization of a divine plan, in which "the
seeds sown are separate seeds, each with its own destiny, but
all of one kind, and sown by the same Sower in the hope of
attaining one harvest." Growth and decay merely hide an under-
lying unity through which God reveals Himself to mankind. Life
presents an alternation of activity and decay, of integration
and differentiation. While events seem superficially recurrent,
history actually operates in the fashion of a wheel, the circular
motion of which serves as the condition for progress.

1. Toynbee's metaphysical doctrine is nowhere explicitly stated. In order to give it the most complete presentation I have utilized Dante's philosophy, which seems closest to the implied concept of Toynbee and applied it to the concept of Transfiguration which is the key of Toynbee's cosmology.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. III. p. 385.

3. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. IV. p. 34

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The disintegration of civilizations merely exhibits the condition for a higher experience, for the vision of the supra-mundane reality which is of and beyond this world, the City of God, which emerges out of the ashes of the human City of Destruction.

This is the concept of transfiguration which transforms the events of this world into incidental appearances in a divine scheme, and which considers true peace that inner state of blessedness which comes with the recognition of limits. Yet how can God's realm be in this world and not be of it? What is the relation of God's immanence to His transcendence.

Dante has poetically resolved the philosophical problems

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 167

2. Toynbee answers the problem with two similes, one geometrical on the nature of the relation of a square to the side of a plane of a cube, the other geographical based on a temporal superimposition of successive layers of settlements on the same site. Neither are completely satisfactory. The geometrical simile merely proves the feasibility of constructing such a relation, not its existence. The geographical analogy illustrates the truism that every physical object is part of a larger whole. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 159-162.

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1

raised by Toynbee. Man participates in a divine plan and in-
sofar as he is God's creature is incapable of greater perfection.
The cognition of the first intelligence (self-evidence of cer-
tain axioms) and the affection for the first objects of desire
(the pure love of God) express the divine imprint. But Man is
also fallen from Eden. He has tasted the fruit of good and evil,
a sin both because of its timing and the overstepping of limits.
Man's fall has been so deep, the corruption of his nature so
extensive that unaided he would be totally incapable of trans-
cending his fallen state. Humanity attains the possibility of
Grace only through the majesty of Christ's sacrifice. It's
existence reveals an unceasing struggle for the self-realiza-
tion of a Will corrupted by desire. Reason, "the virtue that
2
counsels", constitutes the agency by which the will is deter-
mined into its proper direction.

The potentiality to love God expresses Man's true essence,
the misdirection of this feeling contains the fatedness of ex-
istence. Inward blessedness exhibits the reflection of God's
love and that of all true believers and serves as the condition
for immortality. Yet this love can not achieve the full impli-
cations of its immanence in the mundane sphere or by merely
rational conditions. Only Paradise sees the complete union of
Will, Desire and Reason. There everything coalesces in the all-
embracing Love of God. This is true meaning of Piccarda Donati

3

1. It must be repeated that this represents my construction of the spirit of Toynbee's metaphysics.

2. Dante - Purgatory - Canto 18.

3. Dante - Paradiso - Canto 3.

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whose symbolic appearance in the Moon expresses both Volition and Necessity and to whom Dante's rational query regarding the justice of degrees of bliss appears essentially meaningless.

That, too, is the import of the ability, peculiar to the blessed, of reading each other's thoughts. In Paradise, indeed, the "virtue that counsels" has become superfluous, at least in its directing connotations. Knowledge is now instantaneous, belief no longer subject to either buttressing or argument. Everything merges in a total unity brought about by the radiance of an all-illuminating Grace.

This exhibits the assumptions of Toynbee's metaphysical
doctrine, which suffers from an overly utilitarian argumentation
and a lack of explicit formulation. God's love, identical with
that of Man's love for Him, expressed in the feeling of brother-
hood constitutes the condition for the experience of transfigur-
ation, the connecting link between mundane and supra-mundane
reality. 1
The conception of transcendence is given symbolic
expression by Christianity in God, the father, the aspect of
immanence in God, the Holy Ghost. Christ, the Son of God, who
sacrificed himself to attain blessedness for his own, represents
the connecting link to the human heart, however great the logical
difficulty reason finds in the Trinity.
2

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI p. 164 though it must be said that Toynbee can do no better than derive God's love by a syllogism.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 162.

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His metaphysics enable Toynbee to impose a normative pattern on historical events. He validates the attitudes towards life which characterize a disintegrating civilization in terms of Christian theology. For this reason the Stoics' philosophy of Detachment violates the imperative of the brotherhood of Man based on God's love. Therefore Socrates' death loses meaning since it represented a futile reaction to the schism in the Hellenic soul and attempted to transfer its field of action forward on a merely mundane plane. This, too, explains the moral sanction implicit in such statements as the "criminality of militarism", the "greater treasure rejected by the Jews", whose inability to accept Christ doomed their civilization.

Toynbee's metaphysical assumptions permeate his concept of a culture's growth. Primitive humanity represents a Yin state of integration, the condition precedent to a further advance in the divine scheme of things. The creative minority contains the Saints, in whose soul a spark of the divine has kindled a response and who constitute the "virtue that counsels" in Dante's terms towards the uninspired majority. Man's fall from Grace has resulted in that perversity of human nature which prevents direct illumination, forcing recourse to a mimesis doomed by its mechanicalness. At the end of this development

1. See Post.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 132.

3. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. IV.

4. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. IV. p. 243

5. See post for further dependence on Dante.

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stands the City of Destruction, a testimony to Man's present
inadequacy but also a token through its creation of a universal
church of potential fulfillment.

Toynbee, however, did not merely attempt to probe deeper
layers of meaning than Spengler, but conceived himself in the
tradition of the British Empiricists. He asserted that History
revealed its immanence to the application of the proper method-
ology, to the patient classification of data. Such an approach
however, is totally inconsistent with Toynbee's philosophical
basis. A mere empirical analysis of history is impossible, the
regularity observed in phenomena constituting a metaphysical
assumption of order. An empiricist is unable to find purposive-
ness in history, since all regularity implies at least the
necessity of constant conjunction. A historical "law" always
denies the unique experience or the creative act, reducing both
to agents of an inexorability that constantly produces new sur-
face manifestations of success and power.

For success constitutes the final lesson that histori-
cal phenomena teach Man. Each accomplished fact, each surviving
political organization testifies to a method of prevailing,
represents an answer to the pragmatic query: "What works?" A
mere collection of historical data - though it can never be con-
structed free from the metaphysical postulation inherent in

1. See post "The Concepts of Meaning".

2. Hume - An Enquiry on Human Understanding.

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selectivity - will always represent a negation of freedom and an assertion of determinism. The alternatives that accompanied the willied performance are forgotten and only the deed remains a testimony to its fatedness. Failure constitutes the only sin known to history in an empirical and pragmatic approach.

Toynbee, however, does not succeed in constructing an edifice based on empirical considerations. His conclusions are precisely what one would expect in the light of his philosophical assumptions and theological convictions. A pragmatist should have been careful about a method that yields an answer so obviously in line with his preconceptions. Nobody better illustrates the nomesis of the "ego-centric delusion," than Toynbee who castigates it so violently. Love is not immanent in historical data, but constitutes a resolve of the soul. History is not a book designed to illustrate the New Testament, nor do Christ's sayings embody truisms for "successful" conduct. But the superimposition of an empirical method on a theological foundation, with data conceived as proving moral validity instead of the postulates deriving from a transcendental experience yields precisely this result. It never becomes clear whether the Pharisees are condemned because of their failure to recognize Christ's moral superiority or because of their lack of political perspicacity in failing to respond properly to the

1. Particularly as Toynbee refuses to accept the Race Theory of Material Progress because it fits in with proconceptions of age.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 153.

3. See post - Conclusions.

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wave of the future. Similarly Toynbee sways uneasily between
rejecting militarism for its ethical deficiency or its "suicid-
alness."

A normative pattern for the evaluation of laws derived
empirically represents a logical inconsistency. The connection
between moral action and material success can not be found in
manipulatory, technical laws and led Kant to the postulation of
God as the guarantor of the summum bonum. Empirical analysis
compares phenomenal manifestations and seeks a recurring pattern.
Value judgments concern themselves with the inner meaning, the
noumena of existence, the consequence of our experience of
freedom.

It is impossible to find a guarantee for the realiza-
tion of religious faith in the appearance of historical phenomena.
Such a guarantee would reduce ethics to rules of prudence. A
violator of the moral code would in this view be not a knave,
but a fool. Freedom is not achieved by the mere assertion of
a purposiveness that itself becomes but a manifestation of his-
torical law, classifiable as a mechanistic technique for bless-
edness. The salvation of souls and the growth and decay of
civilizations are not connected by a causality denoted by im-
mediate reward and punishment. The wheel of existence may util-
ize its circular motion to progress along virgin ground. Yet
no civilization has yet succeeded in this endeavor and decay has
marked their advance, even in Toynbee's terms. And so the very

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. IV. p. 365. See also post conclusions.

2. See post for Criterion (Appendix A).

3. See post. Ch. History and Man's Experience of Morality. (Kant)

4. See post. Ch. The Sense of Responsibility.

The Nature and Genesis of Civilizations

Two strands of thought can be distinguished in Toynbee's philosophy. The biological approach regards history as an evolutionary process, its recurrence of growth and decay a testimony to man's efforts to turn himself into Superman. This view dominates Toynbee's analysis of the genesis of civilizations and their growth. The theological conception sees in history the realization of a divine plan to teach man the essential meaninglessness of temporal success. All typical attitudes towards life fail, save the recognition of the supra-mundane plane of reality which denies the substantiality of all wordly endeavor. This is the tendency of Toynbee's analysis of the breakdown of civilizations and their disintegration.

Toynbee's postulation of freedom is therefore deceptive. The biological approach reduces Challenge-and-Response to a mechanistic description of the immanent Elan Vital. The theological view considers purposiveness merely God's tool to teach man his impotence on the mundane plane. This is compounded by the empirical method which moves with great patience through a vast amount of historical data. But data belongs to the past and is therefore ruled by necessity. Freedom, on the other hand, can not be derived as attribute of reality but only through an inward experience. History's purpose represents a metaphysical assumption not a necessary conclusion from historical events.

This becomes very noticeable in Toynbee's analysis of the Genesis of Civilizations. Challenge-and-Response, the interaction of Race and Environment is conceived as the key factor in a civilization's birth. But this theory becomes a meaningful assertion of purposiveness only if the analysis concerns itself with the imponderability of See post Ch. History and Man's Experience of Morality (Kent)

the response. This is precisely what an empirical method can not do, however. Its chief concern is not the uniqueness of the response but the generality of the challenge. Toynbee carefully classifies all possible challenges, conceived as qualitatively equivalent and varying only in intensity. This, however, reduces Challenge-and-Response to but a restatement of the Environment theory. These are the problems raised by this phase of "The Study of History."

Toynbee's philosophy of history begins with a query: What are the smallest meaningful entities which a historian may study? An examination of England's past leads Toynbee to the conclusion that every nation belongs to a larger unit which sets the frame-work for its endeavors. Consequently civilizations, not states, are the social atoms with which a philosophy of history must concern itself. For this reason, too, relations between states have a completely different import than contacts among civilizations. Relations between states represent the mechanism of a Society's growth. Contacts among civilizations reveal the process of apparentation-and-affiliation by which new civilizations rise on the ruins of the old. Toynbee distinguishes only two completely independent civilizations among his twenty-one specimen.

Toynbee considers the civilizations intelligible fields of study because they are the representatives of the evolutionary rhythm that preempts existence. Here his biological approach comes to full expression. The dynamic activity of civilizations is but a prelude to a new level of integration which in good time will serve as the

1. See post "Conclusions".

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 131- The Egyptian and the Andean civilizations are the unrelated civilizations.

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jumping off point for a fresh advance. Their common task serves as the condition for the comparability of civilizations. For this reason, Toynbee rejects the view that any one civilization can represent an ultimate stage of development. This assumption derives from the 650-centric delusion which equates the influence of a civilization in its growth phase with the total meaning of history. It reflects an attitude which considers its point of observation as normative instead of accidental, a method discarded by the physical sciences since the Copernican revolution. Moreover, the integration of the world into a Western pattern is confined to the economic and perhaps the political plane. The contributions of the Syriac civilization to Western ideation, the edifice of Chinese philosophy, the profundity of Sumeric astronomy all testify to levels of achievement which make the attribution of ultimacy to any one civilization meaningless.

Toynbee therefore disagrees with the periodization of history into ancient, medieval and modern. Civilizations do not reveal stages of an uninterrupted progress but a common effort, the success of which can be judged only by the attainment of a new level of integration. All civilizations are consequently philosophically contemporary. Compared to the life of the earth, the difference in age between civilizations becomes negligible, the youth of the species in term of its own time-scale apparent.

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 160. See obvious reliance on Kant and even more pronouncedly on Spengler.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 17 (For Toynbee's assumptions as to the age span of the earth.

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The uncertainty about the outcome of the evolutionary process prevents an evaluation of the intrinsic merit of civilizations. This is compounded by the insignificance of any achievement compared to the common goal. Toynbee utilizes the analogy of a one-way street to illustrate the philosophical equivalence of civilizations. The direction of the street forces dynamic activity and prevents reversing or even stopping the vehicle. Nevertheless none of the twenty-one civilizations which have entered the thorough-fare has succeeded in passing out by the further exit. Fourteen have reversed in violation of the rule and seven exhibit various stages of breakdown.

The furthest points of penetration lie so close together that an evaluation either absolutely, or in terms of distance from the exit, becomes a philosophical impossibility.

Civilizations thus represent intelligible fields of study and geni of a species in an evolutionary process. Their relation in time constitutes an aspect of the deepening of religious ideation, but does not result in successive stages of a uniform advance. They are philosophically equivalent, functionally contemporary and allow a comparison for the determination of the laws governing historical processes.

If the civilizations represent geni of a new species,

1. This statement from Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 175 is in flat contradiction with the whole tendency of Vol. V end Vol. VI. See conclusion for discussion.

2. This assumes that Toynbee is aware of the goal and presents another inconsistency in an empirical scheme.

3. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 176 see also post for discussion of this inconsistency.

4. See post.

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what accounts for their genesis? Toynbee endeavors to locate
a principle which distinguishes primitive societies and civil-
izations in order to find a clue for the solution of this prob-
lem. He rejects the view that the possession of institutions,
or the articulation of the division of labour, can serve as a
criterion. These occur in very elaborate form in all types of
historical existence. Toynbee finds the distinguishing feature
in mimesis, a generic feature of social life, defined as "the
acquisition through imitation of social assets which the ac-
quisitors have not originated for themselves and which they
might never have come to possess if they had not encountered
and imitated other people in whose possession these assets were
to be found." ¹ Mimesis is a social drill, its direction towards
the past characteristic of primitive societies, its utilization
for new creativity the mark of civilizations.

This raises the question whether the difference between
civilizations and primitive societies is permanent and funda-
mental. Toynbee's metaphysical assumption of cyclical progress,
determines the reply. Since all existence exhibits not only a
process of growth but testifies to a mode of evolutionary sur-
vival, civilizations can represent merely the most recent stage
of historical development. ² The transformation of Sub-Man into
Man, which must of necessity have occurred in a social environ-
ment, is postulated by Toynbee as having been accomplished

1. Toynbee, op. cit. Vol. I. p. 191.

2. Which in this view becomes almost indistinguishable from
biological processes.

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1. under the aegis of primitive societies. This testifies to a level of dynamic creativeness for surpassing any achievement of the more recent species of civilizations.

The present static condition of primitive societies is therefore deceptive. It does not exhibit uninspired torpor but the last stage of integration. Mankind's task is likened by Toynbee to the climbing of a mountain of vast extend, surrounded by ledges. The exertion required for climbing its steep sides issues forth in a feverish activity that sometimes produces strength sufficient for reaching the next ledge, but more often results in a loss of the grip and a drop to the death on a lower level. The limitations of the human vision confine it to scanning only one perpendicular and one horizontal surface. The exhausted figures on the ledge are therefore frequently mistaken for paralytics and the climbers as the apprehension of activity. But reflection will reveal that the figures on the ledge could have attained it only by prodigious efforts and that many ledges below must be strewn with the corpses of failures of a previous dynamism.

The difference between primitive societies and civilizations is neither fundamental nor permanent then, but the accident of a time and place of observation. The present static condition of primitive societies merely calls to mind past motion, just as the activity of civilizations will cease when Man has

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 192.

2. Note correspondence of this picture with Dante's Mt. Purgatory.

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1

been turned into Superman.

Toynbee's biological approach overrides any mere postu-
lation of purposiveness. History is an evolutionary process
operating by alternate stages of integration and differentiation.
The genesis of civilizations testifies to a mutation from the
static condition to creative effort. This holds true even in
esses of apparentation-and-affiliation. With respect to the
internal proletariat, the dominant minorities are static by
definition. The secession of the internal proletariat reveals
the dynamic reaction which changes the torpor into activity and
the integration into new differentiation. The births of civil-
izations form particular beats of a general rhythmic pulse of
the Universe.

This explains the nature of the genesis of civiliza-
tions but not their particular appearance at a definite time.
What are the factors that lift these entities out of the stream
of humanity? What accounts for the long interval of Yin before
the climb up the precipice commences? True to his empirical
method Toynbee examines all possible causes before drawing conclu-
sions. He finds the negative factor which retards activity in
the vis inertia, the "cake of custom", the inherent tendency
towards stability.

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 194

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 204. Note the similarity of this concept with Spengler and its inconsistency with the emphasis on pure volition.

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This serves as the foil for the creative act, the condition to be overcome before differentiation can set in.

Two obvious alternatives present themselves as the positive factors. The mutation can be postulated as the consequence of some special quality of the human beings who have succeeded in making the transition. The change may, on the other hand, be attributed to a specially favorable constellation of environmental conditions. Neither hypothesis is tenable according to Toynbee.

Race is a construction of human prejudice, another facet of the ego-centric delusion, for which no scientific criteria can be found. Its general acceptance in the West, derives from the Protestant concept of pre-destination which considers material success an indication of divine sanction and ascribes an insuperable deficiency to all disbelievers. It is reinforced by the racial theories developed from de Gobineau, whose primary concern had not been the validation of natural phenomena but political polemic. Against the self-evidence of the first assumption, can be set the fact that race feeling represents a relatively recent Western phenomena. In the medieval period the potential equality of all humanity constituted a cornerstone of popular belief. Moreover, no connection can be established between the pigmentation of the skin and the creative tendency that issues into the Yang state. An empirical survey

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 208.

2. Toynbee Vol. I. p. 227.

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indicates that all races except the Negro race have at one time or another produced a civilization. The simile of the climbers on the precipice proves, however, that this deficiency need not be inherent but may result from the comparative Youth of the species.

The Environmental theory fares no better. Its only conclusive proof, according to Toynbee, would involve an ex-amination of all conditions that are claimed to be conducive to the genesis of civilizations and a determination of whether they were so operative wherever they occurred. Such an empirical survey will reveal a wide variety in the geographical or climactic conditions that attended the genesis of civilizations. Though the Egyptian and Sumeric civilizations developed in a river basin, not every river of similar extend - such as the Colorado river- has produced a civilization. Again though the Eurasian and Arabian steppes have produced nomadism, the American prairie and the Argentine pampas have not served as an obstacle to the birth of civilizations.

If both the race and environmental theories are discredited what does account for the genesis of civilizations? Toynbee finds the solution in a combination of the two

1. For a discussion of empirical proof by simile see Conclusions.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 253. For a discussion of the conclusiveness of such a proof see Conclusions. That these environments might yet produce civilizations is indicated by Toynbee's assertion that the Minoan Island-Empire was not repeated in Indonesia. Recent history may have demonstrated the weakness of this argument.

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factors. Race, while not itself the cause, represents the
manifestation of an immanence that the philosophers call Elan
Vital and the mystics Cod. The Environment, again constitutes
an omnipresent obstacle thwarting this force and challenging
it to battle. The interaction between Race and Environment,
Cod and the Devil exhibits the plot of the Book of Job, of
Soothe's Paust, of life and of history.

The genesis of civilizations is not due to one factor,
but to several. It results not from an entity but a relation.
The interaction that causes the Yin state to change to Yang is
the theme of much of the profoundest mythology. An encounter
between superhuman entities constitutes the plot of the theo-
logical versions as well as the scientific assumptions. The
encounter between Yahwe and the devil is the story of Genesis,
repeated with the same inherent meaning in the New Testament as
the pattern of Redemption. The catastrophic impact of stars in
space serves as the matrix on which physical science constructs
its image of the origin of the Universe. Both accounts agree
in conceiving the encounter as a rare and unique event with con-
sequences of unimaginable portent.

The plot begins with a perfect state of Yin. The perfect

1. Toynbee, op. cit. Vol. I. p. 270.

2. For the validity of conclusions from mythology see Conclusions.

3. Note the reliance of this argument on Spengler's metaphysical postulate.

4. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 274.

5. The operation of challenge-and-response is described at such length because it is central to Toynbee's argument and will be utilized to illustrate limitations of his method - See post conclusions.

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knowledge of Faust, the perfect goodness of Job, the perfect
innocence of Adam and Eve can change into Yang only through the
intervention of an external agent. It is the task of this fac-
tor to supply the inner creative force with that stimulus most
like to evoke the most potently creative response. This es-
sentially expresses the function of the climactic factor in
certain variations of the environment theory.

In Mythology the intrusion of the Devil into God's
realm supplies the impetus for the transition to the Yang state.
The Lord and Satan make a wager which is then tested on a human
agent. Faust, Job, Adam, represents those civilizations on the
ledge who have just attained their feet and commenced the climb
with a full awareness of the dangers of an ascend that brooks
no stopping and in which death represents the only alternative
to the achievement of the next level. However, mythology and
theology make the attainment of the ledge inevitable, the win-
ning of the bet by the devil out of the question.

Does this mean that God has cheated the devil and bet
without risking anything? That would negate the essence of the
encounter and could not therefore produce its vast consequences.
Toynbee replies that the Devil's intervention suffices to
disturb the equilibrium but can not achieve a new level of in-
tegration. God who has been yearning for an opportunity for
fresh creation but could find none in the perfection of His

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 278.

2. This contradicts previous approach to that theory. See post
Conclusions.

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previous effort, is now enabled to restore the equilibrium on
a new and higher plane. In this act of creation, no demon can
participate.

On the mundane plane, the human protagonist constitutes
the theater for this activity and his ordeal accomplishes it-
self in three stages. The first stage finds symbolic express-
ion in the assault of the tempter and changes the state of Yin
to Yang, from harmony to discord, from rest to motion. With
awareness of the fatedness of a course from which there is no
return, begins the second stage, the crisis. The momentary re-
bellion at finding oneself but a tool in God's hands is trans-
cended by the peace of reconciliation. This enables man to
achieve victory through defeat, peace through suffering. Man
resigns himself into God's hands and thus reverses the rhythm
again - from motion towards rest, from storm to calm, from Yang
back to Yin. God stands revealed not as a hard taskmaster, nor
the cause of suffering, but as the all-embracing Love which made
the new level of integration possible.

Toynbee's positive factor then, that explains the gen-
sis of civilizations and the emerging differentiation is the
relation of Challenge-and-Response. Life presents a series of
problems, each a challenge to undergo an ordeal. No calcula-
tion, however prudent of quantitative phenomena can serve for
the prediction of historical events. For nobody can know the

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 284.

2. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 298.

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1. "unknown God", the reaction of the protagonist when the ordeal actually occurs.

Despite this analysis of the imponderability of the response, Toynbee engages in an extensive analysis of the historically effective stimuli to determine the range of possible responses. An examination of the genesis of civilizations leads to the "law" that their birth results not from unusually easy, but from difficult environments frequently in response to changes in climate (f.e. the Genesis of the Egyptian of Sumeric civilization). Though, at first blush, the related civilizations do not seem to constitute a reaction to an environment, closer reflection indicates that their response is not to the physical but to the human environment. The internal proletariat's will to secede testifies to the dominant minority's will to repress, the final breaking away to the intolerability of the challenge. Moreover the geographical location of the affiliated civilization usually presents a greater stimulus than the physical locus of the parent civilizations. Both the physical and human environment, then, can provide the challenge that attends the genesis of civilizations.

The intensity of the response represents a function of the severity of the stimulus. Ease is inimical to civilizations. The stimulus of hard countries led to the superiority

1. Toynbee op. cit. Vol. I. p. 302.

2. Illustrated by examples from the Odyssey, Capua, Roman Campagna. For limitations of this methodology see post "Conclusions."