ARTS AND SCIENCES AND SOCIAL MILIEU 699
The consensus on this point between the victorious advocates of the
case for the Moderns and their discomfited opponents might have been
expected to have settled this question, at least, definitively. Yet, between
the close of this seventeenth-century Kulturkampf and the time at
which this Study was being written, some 250 years later, the con-
troversy over this issue had been reopened again from two sides. On the
one side Oswald Spengler, in a work published on the morrow of the
War of A.D. 1914-18, had put forward the thesis that Mathematics,
Natural Science, and Technology, notwithstanding their proud preten-
sions to be objective, were in fact just as much at the mercy of the
influences and exigencies of diverse social milieux as any activities in the
realm of social human affairs.1 On the other hand, Shelley2 had won
Bury's applause3 for having resuscitated a suggestion—thrown out tenta-
tively, in the course of the seventeenth-century debate, by Charles
Perrault, but not taken up by such circumspect advocates of the Moderns*
cause as Fontenelle and Wotton—that the Fine Arts did, after all,
progressively improve in the same fashion as Mathematics, Science, and
Technology.

Spengler's thesis was enunciated by its author in characteristically
dogmatic language:

'There is not and cannot be any such thing as Number-in-Itself. There
is a plurality of worlds of numbers because there is a plurality of civiliza-
tions. . . . The notion of a universally valid Science which is true for all
civilizations is an illusion.'*

The grain of truth in these misleadingly unqualified statements is the
fact that each particular historical way of life or culture is in some sense
a whole whose parts are sensitively and subtly interdependent. This
truth has presented itself to us forcibly in our study of encounters
between societies that are one anothers* contemporaries.5 We have found
that, when some single element in one culture is modified by the impact
of another culture, the effects of this modification of the assaulted culture
in one point are apt to spread through the entire body social and to make
themselves felt at points which might seem, at first sight, to have no
connexion with the point in which the change has been introduced first.
This intimate interdependence has proved, in the light of such con-
vincing evidence, to be so characteristic a feature of the structure of
Human Society that it would indeed be surprising if one particular
group of activities, represented by Mathematics, Natural Science, and
Technology, should turn out to be entirely unaffected by a tendency
that appears to be one of the general 'laws' of social life; and we may
find ourselves able to come to an understanding with Spengler when
we catch him slipping out of his pontifical vestments and condescending
to explain to us that the distinctive quality of each individual civilization,
on which he has been insisting, is to be interpreted, not as an absolute

1 See the passage quoted in III. iii. 380-2.

2 In his Introduction to The Revolt of Islam,

3 In The Idea of Progress, p. 124, .

+ Spengler, O.: Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. i (Munich 1920, Beck), pp. 85
and 532, quoted in this Study ibid. * See IX. viii, passim.