u.c.

THE DECLINE
OF THE WEST

THE DECLINE
OF THE WEST

[DER UNTERGANG DES
ABENDLANDES]

BY
OSWALD SPENGLER

VOLUME ONE

FORM AND ACTUALITY
[GESTALT UND WIRKLICHKEIT]

VOLUME TWO

PERSPECTIVES OF
WORLD-HISTORY

[WELTHISTORISCHE PERSPEKTIVEN]

\T H E DECLINE
OF THE WEST

FORM AND ACTUALITY

BY
OSWALD SPENGLER

AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION
WITH NOTES BY

CHARLES FRANCIS ATKINSON

LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1

NEW AND REVISED EDITION

Originally published as

Dcr Untcrgang dcs Abendlandes
Gestalt und WMicbkeit

Copyright 1918 by

C. H. Beckschc, Vcrlagsbuchhandlung,
Munchen

SG3

111*

.i

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

SEEN BY

PRESERVATION

SERVICES

THIS TRANSLATION IS
DEDICATED TO

ELLINOR JAMES

A FRIEND

Wenn im Unendlichen dasselbe
Sich wiederholend ewig fliesst,
Das tausendfaltige Gewolbe
Sich kraftig ineinander schliesst;
Stromt Lebenslust aus alien Dingen,
Dem kleinsten wie dem grossten Stern,
Und alles Drangen, alles Ringen
1st ewige Rub in Gott dem Herrn.

GOETHE.

\l\

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE xi

found in Spengler's vast ordered multitude of facts, Eduard Meyer honourably
bears testimony to our author's "erstaunlich umfangreiches, ihm standig
prasentes, Wissen" (a phrase as neat and as untranslatable as Goethe's "exakte
sinnliche Phantasie ' '). He insists upon the fruitfulness of certain of Spengler's
ideas such as that of the "Second Religiousness." Above all, he adheres to and
covers with his high authority the basic idea of the parallelism of organically-
living Cultures. It is not necessarily Spengler's structure of the Cultures that he
accepts parts of it indeed he definitely rejects as wrong or insufficiently es-
tablished by evidences but on the question of their being an organic structure
of the Cultures, a morphology of History, he ranges himself frankly by the side
of the younger thinker, whose work he sums up as a " bleibendes und auf lange
Zeit hinaus nachhaltig wirkendes Besitz unserer Wissenschaft und Literatur."
This last phrase of Dr. Meyer's expresses very directly and simply that which
for an all-round student (as distinct from an erudite specialist) constitutes the
peculiar quality of Spengler's work. Its influence is far deeper and subtler than
any to which the conventional adjective "suggestive" could be applied. It
cannot in fact be described by adjectives at all, but only denoted or adumbrated
by its result, which is that, after studying and mastering it, one finds it nearly
if not quite impossible to approach any culture-problem old or new, dog-
matic or artistic, political or scientific without conceiving it primarily as
' 'morphological.

The work comprises two volumes under the respective sub-titles "Form
and Reality" and "World-historical Perspectives" of which the present
translation covers the first only. Some day I hope to have the opportunity of
completing a task which becomes such is the nature of this book more
attractive in proportion to its difficulty. References to Volume II are, for the
present, necessarily to the pages of the German original; if, as is hoped, this
translation is completed later by the issue of the second volume, a list of the
necessary adjustments of page references will be issued with it. The reader will
notice that translator's foot-notes are scattered fairly freely over the pages of
this edition. In most cases these have no pretensions to being critical annota-
tions. They are merely meant to help the reader to follow up in more detail the
points of fact which Spengler, with his "standig prasentes Wissen," sweeps
along in his course. This being their object, they take the form, in the majority
of cases, of references to appropriate articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica,
which is the only single work that both contains reasonably full information
on the varied (and often abstruse) matters alluded to, and is likely to be acces-
sible wherever this book may penetrate. Every reader no doubt will find these
notes, where they appertain to his own special subject, trivial and even annoy-
ing, but it is thought that, for example, an explanation of the mathematical
Limit may be helpful to a student who knows all about the Katharsis in Greek
drama, and vice versa.

xii TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

In conclusion I cannot omit to put on record the part that ray wife, Hannah
Waller Atkinson, has taken in the work of translation and editing. I may best
describe it by saying that it ought perhaps to have been recorded on the title
page instead of in this place.

C. F. A.

7-

PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

AT the close of an undertaking which, from the first brief sketch to the final
shaping of a complete work of quite unforeseen dimensions, has spread itself
over ten years, it will not be out of place to glance back at what I intended and
what I have achieved, my standpoint then and my standpoint to-day.

In the Introduction to the 1918 edition inwardly and outwardly a frag-
ment I stated my conviction that an idea had now been irrefutably formu-
lated which no one would oppose, once the idea had been put into words. I
ought to have said: once that idea had been understood. And for that we must
look as I more and more realize not only in this instance but in the whole
history of thought to the new generation that is born with the ability to
do it.

I added that this must be considered as a first attempt, loaded with all the
customary faults, incomplete and not without inward opposition. The remark
was not taken anything like as seriously as it was intended. Those who have
looked searchingly into the hypotheses of living thought will know that it is
not given to us to gain insight into the fundamental principles of existence
without conflicting emotions. A thinker is a person whose part it is to sym-
bolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he
thinks as he has to think. Truth in the long run is to him the picture of the
world which was born at his birth. It is that which he does not invent but
rather discovers within himself. It is himself over again: his being expressed
in words; the meaning of his personality formed into a doctrine which so far
as concerns his life is unalterable, because truth and his life are identical. This
symbolism is the one essential, the vessel and the expression of human history.
The learned philosophical works that arise out of it are superfluous and only
serve to swell the bulk of a professional literature.

I can then call the essence of what I have discovered "true" that is, true
for me, and as I believe, true for the leading minds of the coming time; not true
in itself as dissociated from the conditions imposed by blood and by history, for
that is impossible. But what I wrote in the storm and stress of those years was,
it must be admitted, a very imperfect statement of what stood clearly before
me, and it remained to devote the years that followed to the task of correlating
facts and finding means of expression which should enable me to present my
idea in the most forcible form.

To perfect that form would be impossible life itself is only fulfilled in
death. But I have once more made the attempt to bring up even the earliest

xiv PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION

portions of the work to the level of dcfinitcncss with which I now feel able to
speak; and with that I take leave of this book with its hopes and disappoint-
ments, its merits and its faults.

The result has in the meantime justified itself as far as I myself am concerned
and judging by the effect that it is slowly beginning to exercise upon ex-
tensive fields of learning as far as others arc concerned also. Let no one ex-
pect to find everything set forth here. It is but one side of what I see before me,
a new outlook on history and the philosophy of destiny the first indeed of its
kind. It is intuitive and depictive through and through, written in a language
which seeks to present objects and relations illustratively instead of offering
an army of ranked concepts. It addresses itself solely to readers who arc capable
of living themselves into the word-sounds and pictures as they read. Difficult
this undoubtedly is, particularly as our awe in face of mystery the respect
that Goethe felt denies us the satisfaction of thinking that dissections are
the same as penetrations.

Of course, the cry of "pessimism" was raised at once by those who live
eternally in yesterday (^Ewif^estrigen) and greet every idea that is intended for
the pathfinder of to-morrow only. But I have not written for people who
imagine that delving for the springs of action is the same as action itself; those
who make definitions do not know destiny.

By understanding the world I mean being equal to the world. It is the hard
reality of living that is the essential, not the concept of life, that the ostrich-
philosophy of idealism propounds. Those who refuse to be bluffed by enuncia-
tions will not regard this as pessimism; and the rest do not matter. For the
benefit of serious readers who arc seeking a glimpse at life and not a definition,
I have in view of the far too great concentration of the text mentioned
in my notes a number of works which will carry that glance into more distant
realms of knowledge.

And now, finally, I feel urged to name once more those to whom I owe
practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe gave me method,
Nietzsche the questioning faculty and if I were asked to find a formula for
my relation to the latter I should say that I had made of his "outlook" (Aus-
blick) an "overlook" (Uberblick). But Goethe was, without knowing it, a
disciple of Leibniz in his whole mode of thought. And, therefore, that which
has at last (and to my own astonishment) taken shape in my hands I am able
to regard and, despite the misery and disgust of these years, proud to call a
German philosophy.

OSWALD SPENOLER.
Blanktnbttrt am
December,

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

THE complete manuscript of this book the outcome of three years' work

was ready when the Great War broke out. By the spring of 1917 it had
been worked over again and in certain details supplemented and cleared
up, but its appearance in print was still delayed by the conditions then pre-
vailing.

Although a philosophy of historv^s its scope and subject, it possesses also a
certain deeper significance as a commentary on the great epochal moment of
which the portents were visible when the leading ideas were being formed.

The title, which had been decided upon in 1911, expresses quite literally the
intention of the book, which was to describe, in the light of the decline of the
Classical age, one world-historical phase of several centuries upon which we
ourselves are now entering.

Events have justified much and refuted nothing. It became clear that these
ideas must necessarily be brought forward at just this moment and in Germany,
and, more, that the war itself was an element in the premisses from which the
new world-picture could be made precise.

For I am convinced that it is not merely a question of writing one out of
several possible and merely logically justifiable philosophies, but of writing the
philosophy of our time, one that is to some extent a natural philosophy and is
dimly presaged by all. This may be said without presumption; for an idea that
is historically essential that does not occur within an epoch but itself makes
that epoch is only in a limited sense the property of him to whose lot it
falls to parent it. It belongs to our time as a whole and influences all thinkers,
without their knowing it; it is but the accidental, private attitude towards it
(without which no philosophy can exist) that with its faults and its merits

is the destiny and the happiness of the individual.

OSWALD SPENGLER.
Munich,
December, 19/7.

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE ix

AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION xiii

AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION xv

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION i

Scope of the work, p. 3. Morphology of World-History, a new philosophy, p. 5. For whom
is History? p. 8. Classical and Indian mankind ahistorical, p. 9. The Egyptian mummy and
the burning of the dead, p. 13. The conventional scheme of World-History (ancient, mediaeval,
modern), p. 15. Its origin, p. 18. Its breakdown, p. zz. Europe not a centre of gravity, p. Z3.
The only historical method is Goethe's, p. Z5. Ourselves and the Romans, p. z6. Nietzsche
and Mommsen, p. z8. The problem of Civilization, p. 31. Imperialism the last phase, p. 36.
The necessity and range of our basic idea, p. 39. Its relation to present-day philosophy, p. 41.
Philosophy's last task, p. 45. The origin of this work, p. 46.

CHAPTER II. THE MEANING OF NUMBERS 51

Fundamental notions, p. 53. Numbers as the sign of delimitation, p. 56. Every Culture has
its own Mathematic, p. 59. Number as magnitude in the Classical world, p. 64. Aristarchus,
p. 68. Diophantus and Arabian number, p. 71. Number as Function in the Western Culture,
p. 74. World-fear and world-longing, p. 78. Geometry arid arithemetic, p. 81. The Limit
idea, p. 86. Visual limits transcended; symbolical space worlds, p. 86. Final possibilities, p. 87.

CHAPTER III. THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY, (i) PHYSIOGNOMIC AND /
SYSTEMATIC 91

Copernican methods, p. 93. History and Nature, p. 94. Form and Law, p. 97. Physiognomic
and Systematic, p. 100. Cultures as organisms, p. 104. Inner form, tempo, duration, p. 108.
Homology, p. in. What is meant by "contemporary," p. nz.

CHAPTER IV. THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY. (2.) THE DESTINY-IDEA AND ^
THE CAUSALITY-PRINCIPLE 115

Logic, organic and inorganic, p. 117. Time and Destiny, p. 119. Space and Causality, p. 119.
The problem of Time, p. izi. Time a counter-conception to Space, p. iz6. The symbols of
Time tragedy, time reckoning, disposal of the dead, p. 130. Care (sex, the State, works),
p. 136. Destiny and Incident, p. 139. Incident and Cause, p. 141. Incident and Style of exist-
ence, p. 142.. Anonymous and personal epochs, p. 148. Direction into the future and Image of
the Past, p. 152.. Is there a Science of History? p. 155. The new enunciation of the problem,
p. 159.

CHAPTER V. MAKROKOSMOS. (i) THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE AND j
THE PROBLEM OF SPACE 161

The Macrocosm as the sum total of symbols referred to a Soul, p. 163. Space and Death, p.
165. "Alles vergangliche ist nur ein Gleichnis," p. 167. The space problem (only Depth is
space-forming), p. 169. Depth as Time, p. i7z. The world-idea of a Culture born out of its
prime symbol, p. 174. Classical Body, Magian Cavern, Western Infinity, p. 174.

- c

xviii CONTENTS

CHAPTER VI. MAKROKOSMOS. (2.) APOLLJNIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAOIAI
SOUL 181

Prime symbol, architecture, divinities, p. 183. The Egyptian prime symbol of the path, p.
188. Expression-language of art: Ornamentation and Imitation, p. 191. Ornament and early
architecture, p. 196. The window, p. 199. The grand style, p. 200. The history of a Style as
organism, p. 105. On the history of the Arabian style, p. 107. Psychology of art- technique,
r . 114.

CHAPTER VII. Music AND PLASTIC, (i) THE ARTS OF FORM 117

Music one of the arts of form, p. 119. Classification of the arts impossible except from the
historical standpoint, p. iii. The choice of particular arts itself an expression-means of the
higher order, p. in. Apollinian and Faustian art-groups, p. 2.2.4. The stages of Western Music,
p. 116. The Renaissance an anti-Gothic and anti-musical movement, p. 132.. Character of the
Baroque, p. 136. The Park, p. 140. Symbolism of colours, p. 145. Colours of the Near and of
the Distance, p. 146. Gold background and Rembrandt brown, p. 147. Patina, p. 153.

CHAPTER VIII. Music AND PLASTIC, (i) ACT AND PORTRAIT 2.57

Kinds of human representation, p. 159. Portraiture, Contrition, Syntax, p. z6i. The heads of

Classical statuary, p. 164. Portrayal of children and women, p. 166. Hellenistic portraiture,

p. 169. The Baroque portrait, p. I.JL. Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo overcome the

Renaissance, p. 173. Victory of Instrumental Music over Oil-Painting, corresponding to tlv:

i Statuary over Fresco in the Classical, p. r8i. Impressionism, p. 1.85. Pergamum and

Bayrcuch, p. 191. The finale of Art, p. 193.

CHAPTER IX. SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING, (i) ON THE FORM OF THE
SOUL 2.97

Soul-image as function of World-image, p. 199. Psychology of a counter-physics, p. 301.
Apollinian, Magian and Faustian soul-image, p. 305. The " Will " in Gothic space, p. 308. The
"inner" mythology, p. 311. Will and Character, p. 314. Classical posture tragedy and Faustian
character tragedy, p. 317. Symbolism of the drama-image, p. 310. Day and Night Art, p. 314.
Popular and esoteric, p. 316. The astronomical image, 319. The geographical horizon, p. 331.

CHAPTER X. SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING. (JL) BUDDHISM, STOICISM, AND
SOCIALISM 339

The Faustian morale purely dynamic, p. 341. Every Culture has a form of morale proper to
itself, p. 345. Posture-morale and will-morale, p. 347. Buddha, Socrates, Rousseau as protago-
nists of the dawning Civilizations, p. 351. Tragic and plebeian morale, p. 354. Return to
L Nature, Irreligion, Nihilism, p. 356. Ethical Socialism, p. 361. Similarity of structure in the
philosophical history of every Culture, p. 364. The Civilized philosophy of the West, p. 365.

CHAPTER XI. FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 375

Theory as Myth, p. 377. Every Natural Science depends upon a preceding Religion, p. 391.
Statics, Alchemy, Dynamics as the theories of three Cultures, p. 381. The Atomic theory, p. 384.
The problem of motion insoluble, p. 388. The style of causal process and experience, p. 391.
The feeling of God and the knowing of Nature, p. 391. The great Myth, p. 394. Classical,
Magian and Faustian numina, p. 397. Atheism, p. 408. Faustian physics as a dogma of force,
p. 411. Limits of its theoretical (as distinct from its technical) development, p. 417. Self-
destruction of Dynamics, and invasion of historical ideas; theory dissolves into a system of
morphological relationships, p. 410.

INDEX following page 42.8

TABLES ILLUSTRATING THE COMPARATIVE MORPHOLOGY OF HISTORY

At end of volume

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

IN this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining his-
tory, of following the still untravelled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and
specifically of the only Culture of our time and on our planet which is actu-
ally in the phase of fulfilment the West-European-American.

Hitherto the possibility of solving a problem so far-reaching has evidently
never been envisaged, and even if it had been so, the means of dealing with it
were either altogether unsuspected or, at best, inadequately used.

v Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual and incalculable
elements of the separate events, something that we may call a metaphysical
structure of historic humanity, something that is essentially independent of
the outward forms social, spiritual and political which we see so clearly?
Are not these actualities indeed secondary or derived from that something?
Does world-history present to the seeing eye certain grand traits, again and
again, with sufficient constancy to justify certain conclusions? And if so, what
are the limits to which reasoning from such premisses may be pushed?
/ Is it possible to find in life itself for human history is the sum of mighty
life-courses which already have had to be endowed with ego and personality,
in customary thought and expression, by predicating entities of a higher order
like "the Classical" or "the Chinese Culture," "Modern Civilization" a
series of stages which must be traversed, and traversed moreover in an ordered
and obligatory sequence? For everything organic the notions of birth, death,
youth, age, lifetime are fundamentals may not these notions, in this sphere
also, possess a rigorous meaning which no one has as yet extracted? In short,
is all history founded upon general biographic archetypes?

The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear, like the corre-
sponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon limited in time and
space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when compre-
hended in all its gravity, includes within itself every great question of
Being.

If therefore we are to discover in what form the destiny of the Western
Culture will be accomplished, we must first be clear as to what culture is, what
its relations are to visible history, to life, to soul, to nature, to intellect, what
the forms of its manifestation are and how far these forms peoples, tongues

3

4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

and epochs, battles and ideas, states and gods, arts and craft-works, sciences,
laws, economic types and world-ideas, great men and great events may be
accepted and pointed to as symbols.

ii

The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The
means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these means we
arc enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world.

It is, and has always been, a matter of knowledge that the cxpression-fbrms
of world-history arc limited in number, and that eras, epochs, situations,
persons arc ever repeating themselves true to type. Napoleon has hardly ever
been discussed without a side-glance at Cscsar and Alexander analogies of
which, as we shall sec, the first is morphologically quite inacccptable and the
second is correct while Napoleon himself conceived of his situation as akin
to Charlemagne's. The French Revolutionary Convention spoke of Carthage
when it meant England, and the Jacobins styled themselves Romans. Other
such comparisons, of all degrees of soundness and unsoundness, are those of
Florence with Athens, Buddha with Christ, primitive Christianity with
modern Socialism, the Roman financial magnate of Caesar's time with the
Yankee. Petrarch, the first passionate archaeologist (and is not archaeology it-
self an expression of the sense that history is repetition?) related himself men-
tally to Cicero, and but lately Cecil Rhodes, the organizer of British South
Africa, who had in his library specially prepared translations of the classical
lives of the Cxsars, felt himself akin to the Emperor Hadrian. The fated
Charles XII of Sweden used to carry Quintus Curtius's life of Alexander in his
pocket, and to copy that conqueror was his deliberate purpose.

Frederick the Great, in his political writings such as his Considerations,
1738 moves among analogies with perfect assurance. Thus he compares
the French to the Macedonians under Philip and the Germans to the Greeks.
"Even now," he says, "the Thermopylae of Germany, Alsace and Lorraine,
arc in the hands of Philip," therein exactly characterizing the policy of Car-
dinal Flcury. We find him drawing parallels also between the policies of the
Houses of Habsburg and Bourbon and the proscriptions of Antony and of
Octavius.

Still, all this was only fragmentary and arbitrary, and usually implied rather
a momentary inclination to poetical or ingenious expressions than a really deep
sense of historical forms.

Thus in the case of Rankc, a master of artistic analogy, we find that his
parallels of Cyaxarcs and Henry the Fowler, of the inroads of the Cimmerians
and those of the Hungarians, possess morphologically no significance, and his
oft-quoted analogy between the Hellenic city-states and the Renaissance
republics very little, while the deeper truth in his comparison of Alcibiadcs

INTRODUCTION 5

and Napoleon is accidental. Unlike the strict mathematician, who finds inner
relationships between two groups of differential equations where the layman
sees nothing but dissimilarities of outward form, Ranke and others draw their
historical analogies with a Plutarchian, popular-romantic, touch, and aim
merely at presenting comparable scenes on the world-stage.

It is easy to see that, at bottom, it is neither a principle nor a sense of his-
toric necessity, but simple inclination, that governs the choice of the tableaux.
From any technique of analogies we are far distant. They throng up (to-day more
than ever) without scheme or unities, and if they do hit upon something which
is true in the essential sense of the word that remains to be determined
it is thanks to luck, more rarely to instinct, never to a principle. In this re-
gion no one hitherto has set himself to work out a method, nor has had the
slightest inkling that there is here a root, in fact the only root, from which
can come a broad solution of the problems of History.

Analogies, in so far as they laid bare the organic structure of history, might
be a blessing to historical thought. Their technique, developing under the in-
fluence of a comprehensive idea, would surely eventuate in inevitable conclu-
sions and logical mastery. But as hitherto understood and practised they have
been a curse, for they have enabled the historians to follow their own tastes,
instead of soberly realizing that their first and hardest task was concerned with
the symbolism of history and its analogies, and, in consequence, the problem
has till now not even been comprehended, let alone solved. Superficial in many
cases (as for instance in designating Caesar as the creator of the official news-
paper), these analogies are worse than superficial in others (as when phenomena
of the Classical Age that are not only extremely complex but utterly alien to
us are labelled with modern catchwords like Socialism, Impressionism, Capital-
ism, Clericalism), while occasionally they are bizarre to the point of perver-
sity witness the Jacobin clubs with their cult of Brutus, that millionaire-
extortioner Brutus who, in the name of oligarchical doctrine and with the
approval of the patrician senate, murdered the Man of the Democracy.

in

Thus our theme, which originally comprised only the limited problem of
present-day civilization, broadens itself into a new philosophy the philos-
ophy of the future, so far as the metaphysically-exhausted soil of the West
can bear such, and in any case the only philosophy which is within the
possibilities of the West-European mind in its next stages. It expands into the
conception of a morphology of world history, of the world-as-history in contrast to
the morphology of the world-as-nature that hitherto has been almost the only
theme of philosophy. And it reviews once again the forms and movements
of the world in their depths and final significance, but this time according to
an entirely different ordering which groups them, not in an ensemble picture

6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

inclusive of everything known, but in a picture of life, and presents them not
as things-become, but as things-becoming.

The world-as-history, conceived, viewed and given form from out of its oppo-
site the u-orU-as-naturt here is a new aspect of human existence on this earth.
As yet, in spite of its immense significance, both practical and theoretical, this
aspect has not been realized, still less presented. Some obscure inkling of it
there may have been, a distant momentary glimpse there has often been, but
no one has deliberately faced it and taken it in with all its implications. We
have before us two possible ways in which man may inwardly possess and ex-
perience the world around him. With all rigour I distinguish (as to form, not
substance) the organic from the mechanical world-impression, the content of
images from that of laws, the picture and symbol from the formula and the
system, the instantly actual from the constantly possible, the intents and pur-
poses of imagination ordering according to plan from the intents and purposes
of experience dissecting according to scheme; and to mention even thus early
an opposition that has never yet been noted, in spite of its significance the
domain of chronological from that of mathematical number. 1

Consequently, in a research such as that lying before us, there can be no
question of taking spiritual-political events, as they become visible day by day
on the surface, at their face value, and arranging them on a scheme of " causes "
or "effects" and following them up in the obvious and intellectually easy
directions. Such a "pragmatic" handling of history would be nothing but a
piece of "natural science" in disguise, and for their part, the supporters of the
materialistic idea of history make no secret about it it is their adversaries
who largely fail to sec the similarity of the two methods. What concerns us is
not what the historical facts which appear at this or that time arc, per se, but
what they signify, what they point to, by appearing. Present-day historians
think they are doing a work of supererogation in bringing in religious and so-
cial, or still more art-history, details to "illustrate" the political sense of an
epoch. But the decisive factor decisive, that is, in so far as visible history
is the expression, sign and embodiment of soul they forget. I have not
hitherto found one who has carefully considered the morphological relationship
that inwardly binds together the expression-forms of all branches of a Culture,
who has gone beyond politics to^grasp the ultimate and fundamental ideas of
Greeks, Arabians, Indians and Westerners in mathematics, the meaning of their

1 Kant's error, an error of very wide bearing which has not even yet been overcome, was first
of all in bringing the outer and inner Man into relation with the ideas of space and time by pure
scheme, though the meanings of these arc numerous and, above all, not unalterable; and secondly in
allying arithmetic with the one and geometry with the other in an utterly mistaken way. It is not
between arithmetic and geometry we must here anticipate a little but between chronological
and mathematical number that there is fundamental opposition. Arithmetic and geometry arc both
spatial mathematics and in their highct regions they arc no longer separable. Time-reckoning, of
which the plain man is capable of a perfectly clear understanding through his senses, answers the
question "When," not "What" or "How Many."

INTRODUCTION 7

early ornamentation, the basic forms of their architecture, philosophies, dramas
and lyrics, their choice and development of great arts, the detail of their crafts-
manship and choice of materials let alone appreciated the decisive importance
of these matters for the form-problems of history. Who amongst them realizes
that between the Differential Calculus and the dynastic principle of politics in
the age of Louis XIV, between the Classical city-state and the Euclidean
geometry, between the space-perspective of Western oil-painting and the con-
quest of space by railroad, telephone and long-range weapon, between contra-
puntal music and credit economics, there are deep uniformities? Yet, viewed
from this morphological standpoint, even the humdrum facts of politics assume
a symbolic and even a metaphysical character, and what has perhaps been
impossible hitherto things such as the Egyptian administrative system, the
Classical coinage, analytical geometry, the cheque, the Suez Canal, the book-
printing of the Chinese, the Prussian Army, and the Roman road-engineering
can, as symbols, be made uniformly understandable and appreciable.

But at once the fact presents itself that as yet there exists no theory-
enlightened art of historical treatment. What passes as such draws its methods
almost exclusively from the domain of that science which alone has completely
disciplined the methods of cognition, viz., physics, and thus we imagine our-
selves to be carrying on historical research when we are really following out
objective connexions of cause and effect. It is a remarkable fact that the old-
fashioned philosophy never imagined even the possibility of there being any
other relation than this between the conscious human understanding and the
world outside. Kant, who in his main work established the formal rules of
cognition, took nature only as the object of reason's activity, and neither he
himself, nor anyone after him, noted the reservation. Knowledge, for Kant, is
mathematical knowledge. He deals with innate intuition-forms and categories '
of the reason, but he never thinks of the wholly different mechanism by which !
historical impressions are apprehended. And Schopenhauer, who, significantly
enough, retains but one of the Kantian categories, viz., causality, speaks con-
temptuously of history. 1 That there is, besides a necessity of cause and effect
which I may call the logic of space another necessity, an organic necessity in
life, that of Destiny the logic of time is a fact of the deepest inward cer-
tainty, a fact which suffuses the whole of mythological religions and artistic
thought and constitutes the essence and kernel of all history (in contradistinc-
tion to nature) but is unapproachable through the cognition-forms which the :
"Critique of Pure Reason" investigates. This fact still awaits its theoretical
formulation.' As Galileo says in a famous passage of his Saggzatore, philosophy,

1 One cannot but be sensible how little depth and power of abstraction has been associated with
the treatment of, say, the Renaissance or the Great Migrations, as compared with what is obviously
required for the theory of functions and theoretical optics. Judged by the standards of the physicist
and the mathematician, the historian becomes careless as soon as he has assembled and ordered his
material and passes on to interpretation.

8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

as Nature's great book, is written "in mathematical language." We await,
to-day, the philosopher who will tell us in what language history is written
and how it is to be read.

Mathematics and the principle of Causality lead to a naturalistic, Chro-
nology and the idea of Destiny to a historical ordering of the phe-
nomenal world. Both orderings, each on its own account, cover the whole
world. The difference is only in the eyes by which and through which this
world is realized.

IV

Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and
interprets the immediate impressions of his senses.' History is that from
which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the
world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper
reality. Whether he is capable of creating these shapes, which of them it is
that dominates his waking consciousness, is a primordial problem of all human
existence.

Man, thus, has before him two possibilities of world-formation. But it must
be noted, at the very outset, that these possibilities are not necessarily actuali-
ties, and if we arc to enquire into the sense of all history we must begin by solv-
ing a question which has never yet been put, viz., for whom is there History?
The question is seemingly paradoxical, for history is obviously for everyone to
this extent, that every man, with his whole existence and consciousness, is a
part of history. But it makes a great difference whether anyone lives under the
constant impression that his life is an element in a far wider life-course that
goes on for hundreds and thousands of years, or conceives of himself as some-
thing rounded off and self-contained. For the latter type of consciousness there
is ccrtaintly no world-history, no world-as-history . But how if the self-
consciousness of a whole nation, how if a whole Culture rests on this ahistoric
spirit? How must actuality appear to it? The world? Life? Consider the
Classical Culture. In the world-consciousness of the Hellenes all experience,
not merely the personal but the common past, was immediately transmuted
into a timeless, immobile, mythically-fashioned background for the particular
momentary present; thus the history of Alexander the Great began even before
his death to be merged by Classical sentiment in the Dionysus legend, and to
Cesar there seemed at the least nothing preposterous in claiming descent from
Venus.

Such a spiritual condition it is practically impossible for us men of the West,
with a sense of time-distances so strong that we habitually and unquestioningly
speak of so many years before or after Christ, to reproduce in ourselves. But
we arc not on that account entitled, in dealing with the problems of History,
simply to ignore the fact.

INTRODUCTION 9

What diaries and autobiographies yield in respect of an individual, that
historical research in the widest and most inclusive sense that is, every kind
of psychological comparison and analysis of alien peoples, times and customs
yields as to the soul of a Culture as a whole. But the Classical culture possessed
no memory, no organ of history in this special sense. The memory of the Classi-
cal man so to call it, though it is somewhat arbitrary to apply to alien souls
a notion derived from our own is something different, since past and future,
as arraying perspectives in the working consciousness, are absent and the
"pure Present," which so often roused Goethe's admiration in every product
of the Classical life and in sculpture particularly, fills that life with an intensity
that to us is perfectly unknown.

This pure Present, whose greatest symbol is the Doric column, in itself pred-
icates the negation of time (of direction). For Herodotus and Sophocles, as for
Themistocles or a Roman consul, the past is subtilized instantly into an im-
pression that is timeless and changeless, polar and not periodic in structure in
the last analysis, of such stuff as myths are made of whereas for our world-
sense and our inner eye the past is a definitely periodic and purposeful organism
of centuries or millennia.

But it is just this background which gives the life, whether it be the Clas-
sical or the Western life, its special colouring. What the Greek called Kosmos
was the image of a world that is not continuous but complete. Inevitably, then,
the Greek man himself was not a series but a term. 1

VTor this reason, although Classical man was well acquainted with the
strict chronology and almanac-reckoning of the Babylonians and especially the
Egyptians, and therefore with that eternity-sense and disregard of the present-
as-such which revealed itself in their broadly-conceived operations of astronomy
and their exact measurements of big time-intervals, none of this ever became
intimately a part of him.) What his philosophers occasionally told him on the
subject they had heard, not experienced, and what a few brilliant minds in the
Asiatic-Greek cities (such as Hipparchus and Aristarchus) discovered was re-
jected alike by the Stoic and by the Aristotelian, and outside a small professional
circle not even noticed. Neither Plato nor Aristotle had an observatory.
In the last years of Pericles, the Athenian people passed a decree by which all
who propagated astronomical theories were made liable to impeachment
(eitrayyeXta). This last was an act of the deepest symbolic significance, ex-
pressive of the determination of the Classical soul to banish distance, in every
aspect, from its world-consciousness.

As regards Classical history-writing, take Thucydides. The mastery of this
man lies in his truly Classical power of making alive and self-explanatory the
events of the present, and also in his possession of the magnificently practical

1 In the original, these fundamental antitheses are expressed simply by means of werden and sein.
Exact renderings are therefore impossible in English. Tr.

I0 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

outlook of the born statesman who has himself been both general and adminis-
trator. In virtue of this quality of experience (which we unfortunately confuse
with the historical sense proper), his work confronts the merely learned and
professional historian as an inimitable model, and quite rightly so. But what
is absolutely hidden from Thucydides is perspective, the power of surveying
the history of centuries, that which for us is implicit in the very conception of
a historian. The fine pieces of Classical history -writing are invariably those
which set forth matters within the political present of the writer, whereas for
us it is the direct opposite, our historical masterpieces without exception being
those which deal with a distant past. Thucydides would have broken down
in handling even the Persian Wars, let alone the general history of Greece,
while that of Egypt would have been utterly out of his reach. He, as well as
Polybius and Tacitus (who like him were practical politicians), loses his sure-
ness of eye from the moment when, in looking backwards, he encounters motive
forces in any form that is unknown in his practical experience. For Polybius
even the First Punic War, for Tacitus even the reign of Augustus, are inex-
plicable. As for Thucydides, his lack of historical feeling in our sense of the
phrase is conclusively demonstrated on the very first page of his book by
the astounding statement that before his time (about 400 B.C.) no events of
importance had occurred (ou /ie-ydXa yeveaOaC) in the world! 1

Consequently, Classical history down to the Persian Wars and for that
matter the structure built up on traditions at much later periods, are the prod-
uct of an essentially mythological thinking. The constitutional history of

1 The attempts of the Greeks to frame something like a calendar or a chronology after the
Egyptian fashion, besides being very belated indeed, were of extreme naiveti. The Olympiad reckon-
ing is not an era in the sense of, say, the Christian chronology, and is, moreover, a late and purely
literary expedient, without popular currency. The people, in fact, had no general need of a numera-
tion wherewith to date the experiences of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, though a few
learned persons might be interested in the calendar question. We arc not here concerned with the
soundness or unsoundncss of a calendar, but with its currency, with the question of whether men
regulated their lives by it or not; but, incidentally, even the list of Olympian victors before 500 is
quite as much of an invention as the lists of earlier Athenian archons or Roman consuls. Of the
colonizations, we possess not one single authentic date (E. Meyer. Gesch. d. Alt. II, 441. Bcloch.
Gritcb. Gttcb. I, i, 119) "in Greece before the fifth century, no one ever thought of noting or
reporting historical events." (Beloch. I, i, 115). We possess an inscription which sets forth a
treaty between Elis and Hcraea which "was to be valid for a hundred years from this year."
What "this year" was, is however not indicated. After a few years no one would have known
how long the treaty had still to run. Evidently this was a point that no one had taken into account
at the time indeed, the very "men of the moment" who drew up the document, probably them-
selves soon forgot. Such was the childlike, fairy-story character of the Classical presentation of
history that any ordered dating of the events of, say, the Trojan War (which occupies in their scries
the same position as the Crusades in ours) would have been felt as a sheer solecism.

Equally backward was the geographical science of the Classical world as compared with that of
the Egyptians and the Babylonians. E. Meyer (Gtsch. d. Alt. II, 101) shows how the Greeks' knowl-
edge of the forra of Africa degenerated from Herodotus (who followed Persian authorities) to
Aristotle. The same is true of the Romans as the heirs of the Carthaginians; they first repeated the
information of their alien forerunners and then slowly forgot it.

INTRODUCTION n

Sparta is a poem of the Hellenistic period, and Lycurgus, on whom it centres
and whose "biography" we are given in full detail, was probably in the
beginning an unimportant local god of Mount Taygetus. The invention of
pre-Hannibalian Roman history was still going on even in Cesar's time. The
story of the expulsion of the Tarquins by Brutus is built round some contem-
porary of the Censor Appius Claudius (310 B.C.). The names of the Roman
kings were at that period made up from the names of certain plebeian families
which had become wealthy (K. J. Neumann). In the sphere of constitutional
history, setting aside altogether the "constitution" of Servius Tullius, we
find that even the famous land law of Licinius (367 B.C.) was not in existence
at the time of the Second Punic War (B. Niese). When Epaminondas gave
freedom and statehood to the Messenians and the Arcadians, these peoples
promptly provided themselves with an early history. But the astounding
thing is not that history of this sort was produced, but that there was prac-
tically none of any other sort; and the opposition between the Classical and
the modern outlook is sufficiently illustrated by saying that Roman history
before 150 B.C., as known in Caesar's time, was substantially a forgery, and that
the little that we know has been established by ourselves and was entirely
unknown to the later Romans. In what sense the Classical world understood
the word "history" we can see from the fact that the Alexandrine romance-
literature exercised the strongest influence upon serious political and religious
history, even as regards its matter. It never entered the Classical head to draw
any distinction of principle between history as a story and history as docu- I
ments. When, towards the end of the Roman republic, Varro set out to stabi-
lize the religion that was fast vanishing from the people's consciousness, he
classified the deities whose cult was exactly and minutely observed by the State, into
"certain" and "uncertain" gods, i.e., into gods of whom something was still
known and gods that, in spite of the unbroken continuity of official worship,
had survived in name only. In actual fact, the religion of Roman society in
Varro's time, the poet's religion which Goethe and even Nietzsche reproduced
in all innocence, was mainly a product of Hellenistic literature and had almost
no relation to the ancient practices, which no one any longer understood.

Mommsen clearly defined the West-European attitude towards this history
when he said that " the Roman historians," meaning especially Tacitus, "were
men who said what it would have been meritorious to omit, and omitted what
it was essential to say."

In the Indian Culture we have the perfectly ahistoric soul. Its decisive ex-
pression is the Brahman Nirvana. There is no pure Indian astronomy, no
calendar, and therefore no history so far as history is the track of a conscious
spiritual evolution. Of the visible course of their Culture, which as regards its
organic phase came to an end with the rise of Buddhism, we know even less
than we do of Classical history, rich though it must have been in great events

n THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

between the nth and 8th centuries. And this is not surprising, since it was in
dream-shapes and mythological figures that both came to be fixed. It is a full
millennium after Buddha, about 500 A.D., when Ceylon first produces something
remotely resembling historical work, the "Mahavansa."

The world-consciousness of Indian man was so ahistorically built that it
could not even treat the appearance of a book written by a single author as an
event determinate in time. Instead of an organic series of writings by specific
persons, there came into being gradually a vague mass of texts into which
everyone inserted what he pleased, and notions such as those of intellectual
individualism, intellectual evolution, intellectual epochs, played no part in the
matter. It is in this anonymous form that we possess the Indian philosophy
which is at the same time all the Indian history that we have and it is in-
structive to compare with it the philosophy-history of the West, which is a
perfectly definite structure made up of individual books and personalities.

Indian man forgot everything, but Egyptian man forgot nothing. Hence,
while the art of portraiture which is biography in the kernel was un-
known in India, in Egypt it was practically the artist's only theme.

The Egyptian soul, conspicuously historical in its texture and impelled
with primitive passion towards the infinite, perceived past and future as its
uhole world, and the present (which is identical with waking consciousness)
appeared to him simply as the narrow common frontier of two immeasurable
stretches. The Egyptian Culture is an embodiment of care which is the
spiritual counterpoise of distance care for the future expressed in the choice
of granite or basalt as the craftsman's materials, 1 in the chiselled archives, in
the elaborate administrative system, in the net of irrigation works, 2 and,
necessarily bound up therewith, care for the past. The Egyptian mummy is a
symbol of the first importance. The body of the dead man was made everlasting,
just as his personality, his "Ka," was immortalized through the portrait-

1 Contrast with this the fact, symbolically of the highest importance and unparal Idled in art-
history, that the Hellenes, though they had before their eyes the works of the Mycenaran Age and
their land was only too rich in stone, deliberately reverted to wood; hence the absence of architectural
remains of the period 1100-600. The Egyptian plant-column was from the outset of stone, whereas
the Doric column was wooden, a clear indication of the intense antipathy of the Classical soul to-
wards duration.

Is there any Hellenic city that ever carried out one single comprehensive work that tells of
care for future generations? The road and water systems which research has assigned to the My-
ccnxan i.e., the pre-Classical age fell into disrepair and oblivion from the birth of the Classical
peoples that is, from the Homeric period. It is a remarkably curious fact, proved beyond doubt
by the lack of cpigraphic remains, that the Classical alphabet did not come into use till after 900,
and even then only to a limited extent and for the most pressing economic needs. Whereas in the
Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Mexican and the Chinese Cultures the formation of a script begins in
the very twilight of dawn, whereas the Germans made themselves a Runic alphabet and presently
developed that respect for writing as such which led to the successive refinements of ornamental
calligraphy, the Classical primitives were entirely ignorant of the numerous alphabets that were
current in the South and the East. We possess numerous inscriptions of Hittitc Asia Minor and of
Crete, but not one of Homeric Greece. (Sec Vol. II, pp. 180 ct seq.)

INTRODUCTION 13

statuettes, which were often made in many copies and to which it was con-
ceived to be attached by a transcendental likeness.

There is a deep relation between the attitude that is taken towards the
historic past and the conception that is formed of death, and this relation is
expressed in the disposal of the dead. The Egyptian denied mortality, the
Classical man affirmed it in the whole symbolism of his Culture. The Egyp-
tians embalmed even their history in chronological dates and figures. From
pre-Solonian Greece nothing has been handed down, not a year-date, not a true
name, not a tangible event with the consequence that the later history,
(which alone we know) assumes undue importance but for Egypt we possess,
from the 3rd millennium and even earlier, the names and even the exact reign-
dates of many of the kings, and the New Empire must have had a complete
knowledge of them. To-day, pathetic symbols of the will to endure, the
bodies of the great Pharaohs lie in our museums, their faces still recognizable.
On the shining, polished-granite peak of the pyramid of Amenemhet III we can
read to-day the words "Amenemhet looks upon the beauty of the Sun" and,
on the other side, "Higher is the soul of Amenemhet than the height of Orion,
and it is united with the underworld." Here indeed is victory over Mortality
and the mere present; it is to the last degree un-Classical.

In opposition to this mighty group of Egyptian life-symbols, we meet at the
threshold of the Classical Culture the custom, typifying the ease with which it
could forget every piece of its inward and outward past, of burning the dead. To~'
the Mycenaean age the elevation into a ritual of this particular funerary method
amongst all those practised in turn by stone-age peoples, was essentially alien;
indeed its Royal tombs suggest that earth-burial was regarded as peculiarly
honourable. But in Homeric Greece, as in Vedic India, we find a change, so
sudden that its origins must necessarily be psychological, from burial to that
burning which (the Iliad gives us the full pathos of the symbolic act) was the^
ceremonial completion of death and the denial of all historical duration.

From this moment the plasticity of the individual spiritual evolution was
at an end. Classical drama admitted truly historical motives just as little as it
allowed themes of inward evolution, and it is well known how decisively the
Hellenic instinct set itself against portraiture in the arts. Right into the im-
perial period Classical art handled only the matter that was, so to say, natural
to it, the myth. 1 Even the "ideal" portraits of Hellenistic sculpture are

v * From Homer to the tragedies of Seneca, a full thousand years, the same handful of myth-figures
(Thyestes, Clytsemnestra, Heracles and the like) appear time after time without alteration, whereas
in the poetry of the West, Faustian Man figures, first as Parzeval or Tristan, then (modified always
into harmony with the epoch) as Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and eventually Faust or Werther,
and now as the hero of the modern world-city romance, but is always presented in the atmosphere and
under the conditions of a particular century.

i 4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

mythical, of the same kind as the typical biographies of Plutarch's sort. No
great Greek ever wrote down any recollections that would serve to fix a
phase of experience for his inner eye. Not ev;n Socrates has told, regarding
his inward life, anything important in our soise of the word. It is ques-
tionable indeed whether for a Classical mind it was even possible to react
to the motive forces that are presupposed in the production of a Parzeval,
a Hamlet, or a Wcrthcr. In Plato we fail to observe any conscious evolu-
tion of doctrine; his separate works are merely treatises written from very
different standpoints which he took up from time to time, and it gave
him no concern whether and how they hung together. On the contrary, a
work of deep self-examination, the Vita Nuova of Dante, is found at the
very outset of the spiritual history of the West. How little therefore of the
Classical pure-present there really was in Goethe, the man who forgot nothing,
the man whose works, as he avowed himself, are only fragments of a single
grtat confession*.

After the destruction of Athens by the Persians, all the older art-works were
thrown on the dustheap (whence we are now extracting them), and we do not
hear that anyone in Hellas ever troubled himself about the ruins of Mycenx or
Phaistos for the purpose of ascertaining historical facts /Men read Homer but
never thought of excavating the hill of Troy as Schliemann did; for what they
wanted was myth, not history. The works of ^schylus and those of the pre-
Socratic philosophers were already partially lost in the Hellenistic period.
In the West, on the contrary, the piety inherent in and peculiar to the Culture
manifested itself, five centuries before Schliemann, in Petrarch the fine
collector of antiquities, coins and manuscripts, the very type of historically-
sensitive man, viewing the distant past and scanning the distant prospect (was
he not the first to attempt an Alpine peak?), living in his time, yet essentially
not of it. The soul of the collector is intelligible only by having regard to his
conception of Time. Even more passionate perhaps, though of a different
colouring, is the collecting-bent of the Chinese. In China, whoever travels
assiduously pursues "old traces" (Ku-tsi) and the untranslatable "Tap," the
basic principle of Chinese existence, derives all its meaning from a deep his-
torical feeling. In the Hellenistic period, objects were indeed collected and
displayed everywhere, but they were curiosities of mythological appeal (as
described by Pausanias) as to which questions of date or purpose simply did
not arise and this too in the very presence of Egypt, which even by the time
of the great Thuthmosis had been transformed into one vast museum of strict
tradition.

Amongst the Western peoples, it was the Germans who discovered the
mechanical clock, the dread symbol of the flow of time, and the chimes of
countless clock towers that echo day and night over West Europe arc
perhaps the most wonderful expression of which a historical world-feeling is

INTRODUCTION 15

capable. 1 In the timeless countrysides and cities of the Classical world, we find
nothing of the sort. Till the epoch of Pericles, the time of day was estimated-
merely by the length of shadow, and it was only from that of Aristotle that
v x the word o>pa received the (Babylonian) significance of ' ' hour ' ' ; prior to that
there was no exact subdivision of the day. In Babylon and Egypt water-clocks
and sun-dials were discovered in the very early stages, yet in Athens it was
left to Plato to introduce a practically useful form of clepsydra, and this was
merely a minor adjunct of everyday utility which could not have influenced
the Classical life-feeling in the smallest degree.

It remains still to mention the corresponding difference, which is very deep
and has never yet been properly appreciated, between Classical and modern
mathematics. The former conceived of things as they are, as magnitudes, timeless
and purely present, and so it proceeded to Euclidean geometry and mathematical
statics, rounding off its intellectual system with the theory of conic sections.
We conceive things as they become and behave, as junction, and this brought us to
dynamics, analytical geometry and thence to the Differential Calculus.* The
modern theory of functions is the imposing marshalling of this whole mass of
thought. It is a bizarre, but nevertheless psychologically exact, fact that the
physics of the Greeks being statics and not dynamics neither knew the
use nor felt the absence of the time-element, whereas we on the other hand work
in thousandths of a second. The one and only evolution-idea that is timeless,
ahistoric, is Aristotle's entelechy.

f. This, then, is our task. We men of the Western Culture are, with our his-
torical sense, an exception and not a rule. World-history is our world picture
and not all mankind's. Indian and Classical man formed no image of a world in
progress, and perhaps when in due course the civilization of the West is ex-
tinguished, there will never again be a Culture and a human type in which
"world-history" is so potent a form of the waking consciousness.

VI

v^What, then, is world-history? Certainly, an ordered presentation of the past,
an inner postulate, the expression of a capacity for feeling form. But a feeling
for form, however definite, is not the same as form itself. No doubt we feel
world-history, experience it, and believe that it is to be read just as a map is

1 It was about 1000 A.D. and therefore contemporaneously with the beginning of the Roman-
esque style and the Crusades the first symptoms of a new Soul that Abbot Gerbert (Pope
Sylvester II), the friend of the Emperor Otto III, invented the mechanism of the chiming wheel-clock.
In Germany too, the first tower-clocks made their appearance, about 1100, and the pocket watch
somewhat later. Observe the significant association of time measurement with the edifices of reli-
gion.

8 Newton's choice of the name "fluxions" for his calculus was meant to imply a standpoint
towards certain metaphysical notions as to the nature of time. In Greek mathematics time figures
not at all.

16 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

read. But, even to-day, it is only forms of it that we know and not the form of
it, which is the mirror-image of our own inner life.

Everyone of course, if asked, would say that he saw the inward form of
History quite clearly and definitely. The illusion subsists because no one has
seriously reflected on it, still less conceived doubts as to his own knowledge,
for no one has the slightest notion how wide a field for doubt there is. In fact,
the lay-out of world-history is an unproved and subjective notion that has been
handed down from generation to generation (not only of laymen but of profes-
sional historians) and stands badly in need of a little of that scepticism which
from Galileo onward has regulated and deepened our inborn ideas of nature.

Thanks to the subdivision of history into "Ancient," " Medieval " and
"Modern" an incredibly jejune and meaningless scheme, which has, however,
entirely dominated our historical thinking we have failed to perceive the
true position in the general history of higher mankind, of the little part-world
which has developed on West-European l soil from the time of the German-
Roman Empire, to judge of its relative importance and above all to estimate its
direction. The Cultures that are to come will find it difficult to believe that the
validity of such a scheme with its simple rectilinear progression and its mean-
ingless proportions, becoming more and more preposterous with each century,
incapable of bringing into itself the new fields of history as they successively
come into the light of our knowledge, was, in spite of all, never whole-heartedly
attacked. The criticisms that it has long been the fashion of historical re-
searchers to level at the scheme mean nothing; they have only obliterated the
one existing plan without substituting for it any other. To toy with phrases
such as "the Greek Middle Ages" or "Germanic antiquity" does not in the
least help us to form a clear and inwardly-convincing picture in which China
and Mexico, the empire of Axum and that of the Sassanids have their proper
places. And the expedient of shifting the initial point of "modern history"

1 Here the historian is gravely influenced by preconceptions derived from geography, which
assumes a Continent of Europe, and feels himself compelled to draw an ideal frontier corresponding to
the physical frontier between "Europe" and "Asia." The word "Europe" ought to be struck out
of history. There is historically no " European " type, and it is sheer delusion to speak of the Hellenes
as "European Antiquity " (were Homer and Hcraclitus and Pythagoras, then, Asiatics?) and to enlarge
upon their " mission " as such. These phrases express no realities but merely a sketchy interpretation
of the map. It is thanks to this word "Europe" alone, and the complex of ideas resulting from it,
that our historical consciousness has come to link Russia with the West in an utterly baseless unity
a mere abstraction derived from the reading of books that has led to immense real consequences.
In the shape of Peter the Great, this word has falsified the historical tendencies of a primitive human
mass for two centuries, whereas the Russian instinct has very truly and fundamentally divided "Eu-
rope" from "Mother Russia" with the hostility that we can sec embodied in Tolstoi, Aksakov or
Dostoycvski. "East" and "West" arc notions that contain real history, whereas "Europe" is
an empty sound. Everything great that the Classical world created, it created in pure denial of the
existence of any continental barrier between Rome and Cyprus, Byzantium and Alexandria. Every-
thing that we imply by the term European Culture came into existence between the Vistula and tie
Adriatic and the Guadalquivir and, even if we were to agree that Greece, the Greece of Pericles, lay
in Europe, the Greece of to-day certainly docs not.

INTRODUCTION 17

from the Crusades to the Renaissance, or from the Renaissance to the beginning
of the i9th Century, only goes to show that the scheme per se is regarded as un-
shakably sound.

It is not only that the scheme circumscribes the area of history. What is
worse, it rigs the stage. The ground of West Europe is treated as a steady pole,
a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it
seems, than because we live on it and great histories of millennial duration
and mighty far-away Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all
modesty. It is a quaintly conceived system of sun and planets! We select a
single bit of ground as the natural centre of the historical system, and make it
the central sun. From it all the events of history receive their real light, from
it their importance is judged in perspective. But it is in our own West-European
conceit alone that this phantom "world-history," which a breath of scepticism
would dissipate, is acted out.

We have to thank that conceit for the immense optical illusion (become
natural from long habit) whereby distant histories of thousands of years, such
as those of China and Egypt, are made to shrink to the dimensions of mere
episodes while in the neighbourhood of our own position the decades since
Luther, and particularly since Napoleon, loom large as Brocken-spectres. We
know quite well that the slowness with which a high cloud or a railway train
in the distance seems to move is only apparent, yet we believe that the tempo of
all early Indian, Babylonian or Egyptian history was really slower than that of
our own recent past. And we think of them as less substantial, more damped-
down, more diluted, because we have not learned to make the allowance for
(inward and outward) distances.

It is self-evident that for the Cultures of the West the existence of Athens,
Florence or Paris is more important than that of Lo-Yang or Pataliputra. But
is it permissible to found a scheme of world-history on estimates of such a sort?
If so, then the Chinese historian is quite entitled to frame a world-history in
which the Crusades, the Renaissance, Caesar and Frederick the Great are passed
over in silence as insignificant. How, from the morphological point of view, should
our 1 8th Century be more important than any other of the sixty centuries that
preceded it? Is it not ridiculous to oppose a "modern" history of a few cen-
turies, and that history to all intents localized in West Europe, to an "ancient "
history which covers as many millennia incidentally dumping into that
"ancient history" the whole mass of the pre-Hellenic cultures, unprobed and
unordered, as mere appendix-matter? This is no exaggeration. Do we not, for v
the sake of keeping the hoary scheme, dispose of Egypt and Babylon each as
an individual and self-contained history quite equal in the balance to our so-
called "world-history" from Charlemagne to the World-War and well beyond
it as a prelude to classical history? Do we not relegate the vast complexes
of Indian and Chinese culture to foot-notes, with a gesture of embarrassment?

i8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

As for the great American cultures, do we not, on the ground that they do not
"fit in" (with what?), entirely ignore them?

The most appropriate designation for this current West-European scheme of
history, in which the great Cultures are made to follow orbits round us as the
presumed centre of all world-happenings, is the Ptolemaic system of history.
The system that is put forward in this work in place of it I regard as the Coper-
nican discovery in the historical sphere, in that it admits no sort of privileged
position to the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India,
Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico separate worlds of dynamic
being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of
history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual
greatness and soaring power.

VII

The scheme " ancient-mediasval-modern " in its first form was a creation of
the Magian world-sense. It first appeared in the Persian and Jewish religions
after Cyrus, 1 received an apocalyptic sense in the teaching of the Book of Daniel
on the four world-eras, and was developed into a world-history in the post-
Christian religions of the East, notably the Gnostic systems. 2

This important conception, within the very narrow limits which fixed its
intellectual basis, was unimpeachable. Neither Indian nor even Egyptian his-
tory was included in the scope of the proposition. For the Magian thinker the
expression "world-history" meant a unique and supremely dramatic act, hav-
ing as its theatre the lands between Hellas and Persia, in which the strictly
dualistic world-sense of the East expressed itself not by means of polar concep-
tions like the "soul and spirit," "good and evil" of contemporary meta-
physics, but by the figure of a catastrophe, an epochal change of phase between
world-creation and world-decay. 3

No elements beyond those which we find stabilized in the Classical litera-
ture, on the one hand, and the Bible (or other sacred book of the particular sys-
tem), on the other, came into the picture, which presents (as "The Old" and
"The New," respectively) the easily-grasped contrasts of Gentile and Jewish,
Christian and Heathen, Classical and Oriental, idol and dogma, nature and spirit
with a time connotation that is, as a drama in which the one prevails over the
other. The historical change of period wears the characteristic dress of the
religious "Redemption." This "world-history" in short was a conception
narrow and provincial, but within its limits logical and complete. Necessarily,
therefore, it was specific to this region and this humanity, and incapable of any
natural extension.

1 Sec Vol. II, pp. 31, 175.

J Windelband, Gescb. d. Phil. (1903), pp. 175 ff.

In the New Testament the polar idea tends to appear in the dialectics of the Apostle Paul,
while the periodic is represented by the Apocalypse.

INTRODUCTION 19

But to these two there has been added a third epoch, the epoch that we call
"modern," on Western soil, and it is this that for the first time gives the pic-
ture of history the look of a progression. The oriental picture was at rest. It
presented a self-contained antithesis, with equilibrium as its outcome and a
unique divine act as its turning-point. But, adopted and assumed by a wholly
new type of mankind, it was quickly transformed (without anyone's noticing
the oddity of the change) into a conception of a linear progress: from Homer or
Adam the modern can substitute for these names the Indo-German, Old
Stone Man, or the Pithecanthropus through Jerusalem, Rome, Florence and
Paris according to the taste of the individual historian, thinker or artist, who
has unlimited freedom in the interpretation of the three-part scheme.

This third term, "modern times," which in form asserts that it is the last
and conclusive term of the series, has in fact, ever since the Crusades, been
stretched and stretched again to the elastic limit at which it will bear no more. 1
It was at least implied if not stated in so many words, that here, beyond the an-
cient and the medieval, something definitive was beginning, a Third Kingdom
in which, somewhere, there was to be fulfilment and culmination, and which
had an objective point.

As to what this objective point is, each thinker, from Schoolman to present-
day Socialist, backs his own peculiar discovery. Such a view into the course of
things may be both easy and flattering to the patentee, but in fact he has simply
taken the spirit of the West, as reflected in his own brain, for the meaning of the
world. So it is that great thinkers, making a metaphysical virtue of intellectual
necessity, have not only accepted without serious investigation the scheme of
history agreed "by common consent" but have made of it the basis of their
philosophies and dragged in God as author of this or that "world-plan."
Evidently the mystic number three applied to the world-ages has something
highly seductive for the metaphysician's taste. History was described by
Herder as the education of the human race, by Kant as an evolution of the idea
of freedom, by Hegel as a self-expansion of the world-spirit, by others in other
terms, but as regards its ground-plan everyone was quite satisfied when he had
thought out some abstract meaning for the conventional threefold order.

On the very threshold of the Western Culture we meet the great Joachim of
Floris (c. 1 145-1102.), 2 the first thinker of the Hegelian stamp who shattered
the dualistic world-form of Augustine, and with his essentially Gothic in-
tellect stated the new Christianity of his time in the form of a third term to the
religions of the Old and the New Testaments, expressing them respectively as
the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son and the Age of the Holy Ghost. His

1 As we can see from the expression, at once desperate and ridiculous, "newest time" (neueste
Zeif).

2 K. Burdach, Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus, 1918, pp. 48 et seq. (English readers may
be referred to the article Joachim of Floris by Professor Alphandery in the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
XI ed., TV.)

ID THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

teaching moved the best of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, Dante, Thomas
Aquinas, in their inmost souls and awakened a world-outlook which slowly
but surely took entire possession of the historical sense of our Culture. Lessing
who often designated his own period, with reference to the Classical as the
"after-world" 1 (Nachwelt) took his idea of the "education of the human
race" with its three stages of child, youth and man, from the teaching of the
Fourteenth Century mystics. Ibsen treats it with thoroughness in his Emperor
and Galilean (1873), in which he directly presents the Gnostic world-concep-
tion through the figure of the wizard Maximus, and advances not a step beyond
it in his famous Stockholm address of 1887. It would appear, then, that the
Western consciousness feels itself urged to predicate a sort of finality inherent
in its own appearance.

But the creation of the Abbot of Floris was a mystical glance into the secrets
of the divine world-order. It was bound to lose all meaning as soon as it was
used in the way of reasoning and made a hypothesis of scientific thinking, as it
has been ever more and more frequently since the i7th Century.

It is a quite indefensible method of presenting world-history to begin by
giving rein to one's own religious, political or social convictions and endowing
the sacrosanct three-phase system with tendencies that will bring it exactly to
one's own- standpoint. This is, in effect, making of some formula say, the
"Age of Reason," Humanity, the greatest happiness of the greatest number,
enlightenment, economic progress, national freedom, the conquest of nature,
or world-peace a criterion whereby to judge whole millennia of history.
And so we judge that they were ignorant of the " true path," or that they failed
to follow it, when the fact is simply that their will and purposes were not the
same as ours. Goethe's saying, "What is important in life is life and not a
result of life," is the answer to any and every senseless attempt to solve the
riddle of historical form by means of a programme.

It is the same picture that we find when we turn to the historians of each
special art or science (and those of national economics and philosophy as well) .4
We find:

"Painting" from the Egyptians (or the cave-men) to the Impressionists, or

"Music" from Homer to Bayreuth and beyond, or

"Social Organization" from Lake Dwellings to Socialism, as the case may

be,

presented as a linear graph which steadily rises in conformity with the values
of the (selected) arguments. No one has seriously considered the possibility
that arts may have an allotted span of life and may be attached as forms
of self-expression to particular regions and particular types of mankind, and
that therefore the total history of an art may be merely an additive compilation

1 The expression "antique" meant of course in the dualistic sense is found as early as the
Isagpgt of Porphyry (c. 300 A.D.).

INTRODUCTION 2.1

of separate developments, of special arts, with no bond of union save the name
and some details of craft-technique.

We know it to be true of every organism that the rhythm, form and duration
of its life, and all the expression-details of that life as well, are determined by
the properties of its species. No one, looking at the oak, with its millennial life,
dare say that it is at this moment, now, about to start on its true and proper
course. No one as he sees a caterpillar grow day by day expects that it will
go on doing so for two or three years. In these cases we feel, with an unqualified
certainty, a limit, and this sense of the limit is identical with our sense of the
inward form. In the case of higher human history, on the contrary, we take our
ideas as to the course of the future from an unbridled optimism that sets at
naught all historical, i.e., organic, experience, and everyone therefore sets him-
self to discover in the accidental present terms that he can expand into some
striking progression-series, the existence of which rests not on scientific proof
but on predilection. He works upon unlimited possibilities never a natural
end and from the momentary top-course of his bricks plans artlessly the
continuation of his structure.

v/*' Mankind," however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the
family of butterflies or orchids. "Mankind" is a zoological expression, or an
empty word. 1 But conjure away the phantom, break the magic circle, and at
once there emerges an astonishing wealth of actual forms the Living with all
its immense fullness, depth and movement hitherto veiled by a catchword,
a dryasdust scheme, and a set of personal ' ' ideals. ' ' I see, in place of that empty
figment of one linear history which can only be kept up by shutting one's eyes
to the overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of a number of mighty
Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-
region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle; each ,
stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its
own passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death. Here indeed are colours,
Alights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet discovered. Here the Cul-
tures, peoples, languages, truths,, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks
and the stone-pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves but there is no ageing
"Mankind." Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression
which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not o^gulpture, ogjpaint-
ing, one mathematics, one physics, but many, eacOH25^d^pest essence different
fromjge]others7eacrnimited in duration and self-contained* just as each species
of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline.
These cultures, sublimatedTIfe-essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness
as the flowers of the field. They belong, like the plants and the animals, to the
living Nature of Goethe, and not to the dead Nature of Newton. I see world-

1 "Mankind? It is an abstraction. There are, always have been, and always will be, men and
only men." (Goethe to Ludep.)

n THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvellous
waxing and waning of organic forms. The professional historian, on the con-
trary, sees it as a sort of tapeworm industriously adding on to itself one epoch
after another.

But the series " ancicnt-mediasval-modern history" has at last exhausted its
usefulness. Angular, narrow, shallow though it was as a scientific foundation,
still we possessed no other form that was not wholly unphilosophical in which
our data could be arranged, and world-history (as hitherto understood) has to
thank it for filtering our classifiable solid residues. But the number of centuries
that the scheme can by any stretch be made to cover has long since been ex-
ceeded, and with the rapid increase in the volume of our historical material
especially of material that cannot possibly be brought under the scheme the
picture is beginning to dissolve into a chaotic blur. Every historical student
who is not quite blind knows and feels this, and it is as a drowning man that he
clutches at the only scheme which he knows of. The word "Middle Age," l
invented in 1667 by Professor Horn of Leyden, has to-day to cover a formless
and constantly extending mass which can only be defined, negatively, as every
thing not classifiable under any pretext in one of the other two (tolerably well-
ordered) groups. We have an excellent example of this in our feeble treatment
and hesitant judgment of modern Persian, Arabian and Russian history. But,
above all, it has become impossible to conceal the fact that this so-called history
of the world is a limited history, first of the Eastern Mediterranean region and
then, with an abrupt change of scene at the Migrations (an event important
only to us and therefore greatly exaggerated by us, an event of purely Western
and not even Arabian significance), of West-Central Europe. When Hegel de-
clared so naively that he meant to ignore those peoples which did not fit into
his scheme of history, he was only making an honest avowal of methodic
premisses that every historian finds necessary for his purpose and every his-
torical work shows in its lay-out. In fact it has now become an affair of
scientific tact to determine which of the historical developments shall be
seriously taken into account and which not. Ranke is a good example.

VIII

To-day we think in continents, and it is only our philosophers and historians
who have not realized that we do so. Of what significance to us, then, are con-
ceptions and purviews that they put before us as universally valid, when in
truth their furthest horizon does not extend beyond the intellectual atmosphere
of Western Man?

Examine, from this point of view, our best books. When Plato speaks of

1 " Middle Ages" connotes the history of the space-time region in which Latin was the language
tf the Church and the Uarntd. The mighty course of Eastern Christianity, which, long before Boniface,
spread over Turkestan into China and through Sabxa into Abyssinia, was entirely excluded from
this "world-history."

INTRODUCTION 13

humanity, he means the Hellenes in contrast to the barbarians, which is entirely
consonant with the ahistoric mode of the Classical life and thought, and his
premisses take him to conclusions that for Greeks were complete and significant.
W.ien, however, Kant philosophizes, say on ethical ideas, he maintains the
validity of his theses for men of all times and places. He does not say this in
so many words, for, for himself and his readers, it is something that goes with-
out saying. In his aesthetics he formulates the principles, not of Phidias's art,
or Rembrandt's art, but of Art generally. But what he poses as necessary forms
of thought are in reality only necessary forms of Western thought, though a
glance at Aristotle and his essentially different conclusions should have sufficed
to show that Aristotle's intellect, not less penetrating than his own, was of
different structure from it. The categories of the Westerner are just as alien to
Russian thought as those of the Chinaman or the ancient Greek are to him. For
us, the effective and complete comprehension of Classical root-words is just as
impossible as that of Russian 1 and Indian, and for the modern Chinese or Arab,
with their utterly different intellectual constitutions, "philosophy from Bacon
to Kant ' ' has only a curiosity-value.

y It is this that is lacking to the Western thinker, the very thinker in whom
we might have expected to find it insight into the historically relative char-
acter of his data, which are expressions of one specific existence and one only;
knowledge of the necessary limits of their validity; the conviction that his
"unshakable" truths and "eternal" views are simply true for him and eternal
for his world-view; the duty of looking beyond them to find out what the men
of other Cultures have with equal certainty evolved out of themselves. That
and nothing else will impart completeness to the philosophy of the future, and
only through an understanding of the living world shall we understand the
symbolism of history. Here there is nothing constant, nothing universal. We
must cease to speak of the forms of "Thought," the principles of "Tragedy,"
the mission of "The State." Universal validity involves always the fallacy of
arguing from particular to particular.

But something much more disquieting than a logical fallacy begins to appear
when the centre of gravity of philosophy shifts from the abstract-systematic
to the practical-ethical and our Western thinkers from Schopenhauer onward
turn from the problem of cognition to the problem of life (the will to life, to
power, to action). Here it is not the ideal abstract "man" of Kant that is
subjected to examination, but actual man as he has inhabited the earth during
historical time, grouped, whether primitive or advanced, by peoples; and it is
more than ever futile to define the structure of his highest ideas in terms of the
" ancient-mediseval-modern " scheme with its local limitations. But it is done,
nevertheless.

1 See Vol. II, p. 361, foot-note. To the true Russian the basic proposition of Darwinism is as
devoid of meaning as that of Copernicus is to a true Arab.

14 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Consider the historical horizon of Nietzsche. His conceptions of decadence,
militarism, the transvaluation of all values, the will to power, lie deep in the
essence of Western civilization and are for the analysis of that civilization of
decisive importance. But what, do we find, was the foundation on which he
built up his creation? Romans and Greeks, Renaissance and European preseat,
with a fleeting and uncomprehending side-glance at Indian philosophy in
short "ancient, medizval and modern" history. Strictly speaking, he never
once moved outside the scheme, not did any other thinker of his time.

What correlation, then, is there or can there be of his idea of the "Diony-
sian" with the inner life of a highly-civilized Chinese or an up-to-date Ameri-
can? What is the significance of his type of the "Superman" for the world
of Islam? Can image-forming antitheses of Nature and Intellect, Heathen and
Christian, Classical and Modern, have any meaning for the soul of the Indian
or the Russian? What can Tolstoi who from the depths of his humanity
rejected the whole Western world-idea as something alien and distant do
with the "Middle Ages," with Dante, with Luther? What can a Japanese do
with Parzcval and "Zarathustra," or an Indian with Sophocles? And is the
thought-range of Schopenhauer, Comte, Feuerbach, Hebbel or Strindberg any
wider? Is not their whole psychology, for all its intention of world-wide
validity, one of purely West-European significance?

How comic seem Ibsen's woman-problems which also challenge the
attention of all "humanity" when, for his famous Nora, the lady of the
North-west European city with the horizon that is implied by a house-rent
of 100 to 300 a year and a Protestant upbringing, we substitute Ciesar's wife,
Madame de Sevigne, a Japanese or a Turkish peasant woman! But, for that
matter, Ibsen's own circle of vision is -that of the middle class in a great city of
yesterday and to-day. His conflicts, which start from spiritual premisses that
did not exist till about 1850 and can scarcely last beyond 1950, are neither those
of the great world nor those of the lower masses, still less those of the cities in-
habited by non-European populations. .

All these are local and temporary values most of them indeed limited
to the momentary "intelligentsia" of cities of West-European type. World-
historical or "eternal" values they emphatically are not. Whatever the sub-
stantial importance of Ibsen's and Nietzsche's generation may be, it infringes
the very meaning of the word "world-history" which denotes the totality
and not a selected part to subordinate, to undervalue, or to ignore the factors
which lie outside "modem" interests. Yet in fact they are so undervalued or
ignored to an amazing extent. What the West has said and thought, hitherto,
on the problems of space, time, motion, number, will, marriage, property,
tragedy, science, has remained narrow and dubious, because men were always
looking for the solution off he question. It was never seen that many questioners
implies many answers, that any philosophical question is really a veiled desire

INTRODUCTION 2.5

to get an explicit affirmation of what is implicit in the question itself, that the
great questions of any period are fluid beyond all conception, and that therefore
it is only by obtaining a group of historically limited solutions and measuring it by
utterly impersonal criteria that the final secrets can be reached. The real student
of mankind treats no standpoint as absolutely right or absolutely wrong. In
the face of such grave problems as that of Time or that of Marriage, it is in-
sufficient to appeal to personal experience, or an inner voice, or reason, or the
opinion of ancestors or contemporaries. These may say what is true for the
questioner himself and for his time, but that is not all. In other Cultures the
phenomenon talks a different language, for other men there are different truths.
The thinker must admit the validity of all, or of none.

V How greatly, then, Western world-criticism can be widened and deepened!
How immensely far beyond the innocent relativism of Nietzsche and his genera-
tion one must look how fine one's sense for form and one's psychological
insight must become how completely one must free oneself from limitations
of self, of practical interests, of horizon before one dare assert the pretension
to understand world-history, the world-as-history.

IX

In opposition to all these arbitary and narrow schemes, derived from tradi-
tion or personal choice, into which history is forced, I put forward the natural,
the "Copernican," form of the historical process which lies deep in the essence
of that process and reveals itself only to an eye perfectly free from prepossessions.

Such an eye was Goethe's. That which Goethe called Living Nature is
exactly that which we are calling here world-history, world-as-history. Goethe,
who as artist portrayed the life and development, always the life and develop-
ment, of his figures, the thing-becoming and not the thing-become ("Wilhelm
Meister" and "Wahrheit und Dichtung") hated Mathematics. For him, the
world-as-mechanism stood opposed to the world-as-organism, dead nature to
living nature, law to form. As naturalist, every line he wrote was meant to
display the image of a thing-becoming, the "impressed form" living and de-
veloping. Sympathy, observation, comparison, immediate and inward cer-
tainty, intellectual flair these were the means whereby he was enabled to
approach the secrets of the phenomenal world in motion. Now these are the means
of historical research precisely these and no others. It was this godlike insight
that prompted him to say at the bivouac fire on the evening of the Battle of
Valmy: "Here and now begins a new epoch of world history, and you, gentle-
men, can say that you 'were there.' " No general, no diplomat, let alone the
philosophers, ever so directly felt history "becoming." It is the deepest judg-
ment that any man ever uttered about a great historical act in the moment of
its accomplishment.
" And just as he followed out the development of the plant-form from the leaf,

16 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the birth of the vertebrate type, the process of the geological strata the
Destiny in nature and not the Causality so here we shall develop the form-
language of human history, its periodic structure, its organic logic out of the
profusion of all the challenging details.

In other aspects, mankind is habitually, and rightly, reckoned as one of the
organisms of the earth's surface. Its physical structure, its natural functions,
the whole phenomenal conception of it, all belong to a more comprehensive
unity. Only in this aspect is it treated otherwise, despite that deeply-felt
relationship of plant destiny and human destiny which is an eternal theme of
all lyrical poetry, and despite that similarity of human history to that of any
other of the higher life-groups which is the refrain of endless beast-legends,
sagas and fables.

But only bring analogy to bear on this aspect as on the rest, Jetting the
world of human Cultures intimately and unreservedly work upon the imagina-
tion instead of forcing it into a ready-made scheme. Let the words youth,
growth, maturity, decay hitherto, and to-day more than ever, used to ex-
press subjective valuations and entirely personal preferences in sociology, ethics
and aesthetics be taken at last as objective descriptions of organic states.
Set forth the Classical Culture as a self-contained phenomenon embodying and
expressing the Classical soul, put it beside the Egyptian, the Indian, the Baby-
lonian, the Chinese and the Western, and determine for each of these higher
individuals what is typical in their surgings and what is necessary in the riot
of incident. And then at last will unfold itself the picture of world-history
that is natural to us, men of the West, and to us alone.

Our narrower task, then, is primarily to determine, from such a world-
survey, the state of West Europe and America as at the epoch of 1800-2.000
to establish the chronological position of this period in the ensemble of Western
culture-history, its significance as a chapter that is in one or other guise neces-
sarily found in the biography of every Culture, and the organic and symbolic
meaning of its political, artistic, intellectual and social expression-forms.

Considered in the spirit of analogy, this period appears as chronologically
parallel- "contemporary" in our special sense with the phase of Hel-
lenism, and its present culmination, marked by the World-War, corresponds
with the transition from the Hellenistic to the Roman age. Rome, with its
rigorous realism uninspired, barbaric, disciplined, practical, Protestant,
Prussian will always give us, working as we must by analogies, the key to
understanding our own future. The break of destiny that we express by hyphening
the words " Greeks Romans" is occurring for us also, separating that which is
already fulfilled from that which is to come. Long ago we might and should have
seen in the "Classical" world a development which is the complete counter-

INTRODUCTION 2.7

part of our own Western development, differing indeed from it in every detail
of the surface but entirely similar as regards the inward power driving the
great organism towards its end. We might have found the constant alter ego
of our own actuality in establishing the correspondence, item by item, from
the "Trojan War" and the Crusades, Homer and the Nibelungenlied, through
Doric and Gothic, Dionysian movement and Renaissance, Polycletus and John
Sebastian Bach, Athens and Paris, Aristotle and Kant, Alexander and Napoleon,
to the world-city and the imperialism common to both Cultures.

Unfortunately, this requires an interpretation of the picture of Classical his-
tory very different from the incredibly one-sided, superficial, prejudiced, limited
picture that we have in fact given to it. We have, in truth been only too con-
scious of our near relation to the Classical Age, and only too prone in con-
sequence to unconsidered assertion of it. Superficial similarity is a great snare,
and our entire Classical study fell a victim to it as soon as it passed from the
(admittedly masterly) ordering and critique of the discoveries to the inter-
pretation of their spiritual meaning. That close inward relation in which we
conceive ourselves to stand towards the Classical, and which leads us to think
that we are its pupils and successors (whereas in reality we are simply its

v adorers), is a venerable prejudice which ought at last to be put aside. The
whole religious-philosophical, art-historical and social-critical work of the
i9th Century has been necessary to enable us, not to undersfandlEschylus, Plato,
Apollo and Dionysus, the Athenian state and Cassarism (which we are far indeed
from doing), but to begin to realize, once and for all, how immeasurably alien
and distant these things are from our inner selves more alien, maybe, than
Mexican gods and Indian architecture.

Our views of the Grasco-Roman Culture have always swung between two
extremes, and our standpoints have invariably been defined for us by the
" ancient-mediasval-modern " scheme. One. group, public men before all else
economists, politicians, jurists opine that "present-day mankind" is
making excellent progress, assess it and its performances at the very highest
value and measure everything earlier by its standards. There is no modern
party that has not weighed up Cleon, Marius, Themistocles, Catiline, the
Gracchi, according to its own principles. On the other hand we have the
group of artists, poets, philologists and philosophers. These feel themselves
to be out of their element in the aforesaid present, and in consequence choose
for themselves in this or that past epoch a standpoint that is in its way just
as absolute and dogmatic from which to condemn "to-day." The one group
looks upon Greece as a "not yet," the other upon modernity as a "nevermore."

^ Both labour under the obsession of a scheme of history which treats the two
epochs as part of the same straight line.

In this opposition it is the two souls of Faust that express themselves. The
danger of the one group lies in a clever superficiality. In its hands there remains

2.8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

finally, of all Classical Culture, of all reflections of the Classical soul, nothing
but a bundle of social, economic, political and physiological facts, and the rest
is treated as "secondary results," "reflexes," "attendant phenomena." In the
books of this group we find not a hint of the mythical force of ^schylus's
choruses, of the immense mother-earth struggle of the early sculpture, the
Doric column, of the richness of the Apollo-cult, of the real depth of the Roman
Emperor-worship. The other group, composed above all of belated roman-
ticists represented in recent times by the three Basel professors Bachofen,
Burckhardt and Nietzsche succumb to the usual dangers of ideology. They
lose themselves in the clouds of an antiquity that is really no more than the
image of their own sensibility in a philological mirror. They rest their case
upon the only evidence which they consider worthy to support it, viz., the
relics of the old literature, yet there never was a Culture so incompletely repre-
sented for us by its great writers. 1 The first group, on the other hand, supports
itself principally upon the humdrum material of law-sources, inscriptions and
coins (which Burckhardt and Nietzsche, very much to their own Joss, despised)
and subordinates thereto, often with little or no sense of truth and fact, the
surviving literature. Consequently, even in point of critical foundations,
neither group takes the other seriously. I have never heard that Nietzsche and
Mommsen had the smallest respect for each other.

But neither group has attained to that higher method of treatment which
reduces this opposition of criteria to ashes, although it was within their power
to do so. In their self-limitation they paid the penalty for taking over the
causality-principle from natural science. Unconsciously they arrived at a prag-
matism that sketchily copied the world-picture drawn by physics and, instead
of revealing, obscured and confused the quite other-natured forms of history.
They had no better expedient for subjecting the mass of historical material to
critical and normative examination than to consider one complex of phenomena
as being primary and causative and the rest as being secondary, as being con-
sequences or effects. And it was not only the matter-of-fact school that re-
sorted to this method. The romanticists did likewise, for History had not
revealed even to their dreaming gaze its specific logic; and yet they felt that

1 This is conclusively proved by the selection that determined survival, which was governed
not by mere chance but very definitely by a deliberate tendency. The Atticism of the Augustan Age,
tired, sterile, pedantic, back-looking, conceived the hall-mark "classical" and allowed only a very
small group of Greek works up to Plato to bear it. The rest, including the whole wealth of Hellenis-
tic literature, was rejected and has been almost entirely lost. It is this pedagogue's anthology that
has survived (almost in its entirety) and so fixed the imaginary picture of "Classical Antiquity"
alike for the Renaissance Florentine and for Winckclmann, Holderlin, and even Nietzsche.

[In this English translation, it should be mentioned, the word "Classical" has almost uni-
versally been employed to translate the German antike, as, in the translator's judgment, no literal
equivalent of the German word would convey the specific meaning attached to antike throughout
the work, "antique," "ancient" and the like words having for us a much more general connota-
tion. TV.]

INTRODUCTION 2.9

there was an immanent necessity in it to determine this somehow, rather than
turn their backs upon History in despair like Schopenhauer.

XI

Briefly, then, there are two ways of regarding the Classical the material-
istic and the ideological. By the former, it is asserted that the sinking of one
scale-pan has its cause in the rising of the other, and it is shown that this
occurs invariably (truly a striking theorem); and in this juxtaposing of cause
and effect we naturally find the social and sexual, at all events the purely polit-
ical, facts classed as causes and the religious, intellectual and (so far as the
materialist tolerates them as facts at all) the artistic as effects. On the other
hand, the ideologues show that the rising of one scale-pan follows from the
sinking of the other, which they are able to prove of course with equal exacti-
tude; this done, they lose themselves in cults, mysteries, customs, in the secrets
of the strophe and the line, throwing scarcely a side-glance at the commonplace
daily life for them an unpleasant consequence of earthly imperfection. Each
side, with its gaze fixed on causality, demonstrates that the other side either
cannot or will not understand the true linkages of things and each ends by
calling the other blind, superficial, stupid, absurd or frivolous, oddities or
Philistines. It shocks the ideologue if anyone deals with Hellenic finance-
problems and instead of, for example, telling us the deep meanings of the
Delphic oracle, describes the far-reaching money operations which the Oracle
priests undertook with their accumulated treasures. The politician, on the
other hand, has a superior smile for those who waste their enthusiasm on ritual
formulas and the dress of Attic youths, instead of writing a book adorned with
up-to-date catchwords about antique class-struggles.

The one type is foreshadowed from the very outset in Petrarch; it created
Florence and Weimar and the Western classicism. The other type appears in
the middle of the i8th Century, along with the rise of civilized, 1 economic-
megalopolitan 2 politics, and England is therefore its birthplace (Grote). At
bottom, the opposition is between the conceptions of culture-man and those
of civilization-man, and it is too deep, too essentially human, to allow the
weaknesses of both stand-points alike to be seen or overcome.

The materialist himself is on this point an idealist. He too, without wish-
ing or desiring it, has made his views dependent upon his wishes. In fact all
our finest minds without exception have bowed down reverently before the
picture of the Classical, abdicating in this one instance alone their function of
unrestricted criticism. The freedom and power of Classical research are always

1 As will be seen later, the words ^ivilisierte and Zivilisation possess in this work a special
meaning. Tr.

2 English not possessing the adjective-forming freedom of German, we are compelled to coin a
word for the rendering of grossstadtisch, an adjective not only frequent but of emphatic significance
in the author's argument. Tr.

3 o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

hindered, and its data obscured, by a certain almost religious awe. In all history
there is no analogous case of one Culture making a passionate cult of the
memory of another. Our devotion is evidenced yet again in the fact that since
the Renaissance, a thousand years of history have been undervalued so that an
ideal "Middle" Age may serve as a link between ourselves and antiquity. We
Westerners have sacrificed on the Classical altar the purity and independence of
our art, for we have not dared to create without a side-glance at the "sublime
exemplar." We have projected our own deepest spiritual needs and feelings
on to the Classical picture. Some day a gifted psychologist will deal with
this most fateful illusion and tell us the story of the "Classical" that we have
so consistently reverenced since the days of Gothic. Few theses would be more
helpful for the understanding of the Western soul from Otto III, the first victim
of the South, to Nietzsche, the last.

Goethe on his Italian tour speaks with enthusiasm of the buildings of
Palladio, whose frigid and academic work we to-day regard very sceptically:
but when he goes on to Pompeii he does not conceal his dissatisfaction in
experiencing "a strange, half-unpleasant impression," and what he has to say
on the temples of Pa^stum and Segesta masterpieces of Hellenic art is
embarrassed and trivial. Palpably, when Classical antiquity in its full force
met him face to face, he did not recognize it. It is the same with all others.
Much that was Classical they chose not to see, and so they saved their inward
image of the Classical which was in reality the background of a life-ideal
that they themselves had created and nourished with their heart's blood, a
vessel filled with their own world-feeling, a phantom, an idol. The audacious
descriptions of Aristophanes, Juvenal or Petronius of life in the Classical cities
the southern dirt and riff-raff, terrors and brutalities, pleasure-boys and
Phrynes, phallus worship and imperial orgies excite the enthusiasm of the
student and the dilettante, who find the same realities in the world-cities of
to-day too lamentable and repulsive to face. "In the cities life is bad; there
are too many of the lustful." also sprach Zarathustra. They commend the
state-sense of the Romans, but despise the man of to-day who permits himself
any contact with public affairs. There is a type of scholar whose clarity of
vision comes under some irresistible spell when it turns from a frock-coat to a
toga, from a British football-ground to a Byzantine circus, from a transcon-
tinental railway to a Roman road in the Alps, from a thirty-knot destroyer to
a trireme, from Prussian bayonets to Roman spears nowadays, even, from a
modern engineer's Suez Canal to that of a Pharaoh. He would admit a steam-
engine as a symbol of human passion and an expression of intellectual force if
it were Hero of Alexandria who invented it, not otherwise. To such it seems
blasphemous to talk of Roman central-heating or book-keeping in preference
to the worship of the Great Mother of the Gods.

But the other school sees nothing but these things. It thinks it exhausts the

INTRODUCTION 31

essence of this Culture, alien as it is to ours, by treating the Greeks as simply
equivalent, and it obtains its conclusions by means of simple factual substitur
tions, ignoring altogether the Classical soul. That there is not the slightest
inward correlation between the things meant by "Republic," "freedom,"
"property" and the like then and there and the things meant by such words
here and now, it has no notion whatever. It makes fun of the historians of
the age of Goethe, who honestly expressed their own political ideals in classical
history forms and revealed their own personal enthusiasms in vindications or
condemnations of lay-figures named Lycurgus, Brutus, Cato, Cicero, Augustus
but it cannot itself write a chapter without reflecting the party opinion of
its morning paper.

^ It is, however, much the same whether the past is treated in the spirit of
Don Quixote or in that of Sancho Panza. Neither way leads to the end. In
sum, each school permits itself to bring into high relief that part of the

\/Classical which best expresses its own views Nietzsche the pre-Socratic
Athens, the economists the Hellenistic period, the politicians Republican Home,
poets the Imperial Age.

Not that religious and artistic phenomena are more primitive than social
and economic, any more than the reverse. For the man who in these things
has won his unconditional freedom of outlook, beyond all personal interests
whatsoever, there is no dependence, no priority, no rejationjrf cause and effect,

v/ho differentiation of value or importance. That which assigns relative ranks
amongst theln3ivldual detail-facts is simply the greater or less purity and force
of their form-language, their symbolism, beyond all questions of good and evil,
high and low, useful and ideal.

XII

Looked at in this way, the "Decline of the West" comprises nothing less
than the problem of Civilisation. We have before us one of the fundamental
questions of all higher history. What is Civilization, understood as the organic-
logical sequel, fulfilment and finale of a culture?

For every Culture has its own Civilization. In this work, for the first time
the two words, hitherto used to express an indefinite, more or less ethical,
distinction, are used in a periodic sense, to express a strict and necessary organic
succession. The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture, and in this
principle we obtain the viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems
of historical morphology become capable of solution. Civilizations are the
most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is
capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-
becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age
and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the
spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet
by inward necessity reached again and again.

32. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

So, for the first time, we are enabled to understand the Romans as the
successors of the Greeks, and light is projected into the deepest secrets of the
late-Classical period. What, but this, can be the meaning of the fact which
can only be disputed by vain phrases that the Romans were barbarians who
did not precede but closed a great development? Unspiritual, unphilosophical,
devoid of art, clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible
successes, they stand between the Hellenic Culture and nothingness. An im-
agination directed purely to practical objects they had religious laws gov-
erning godward relations as they had other laws governing human relations,
but there was no specifically Roman saga of gods was something which is
not found at all in Athens. In a word, Greek soul Roman intellect; and this
antithesis is the differentia between Culture and Civilization. Nor is it only to
the Classical that it applies. Again and again there appears this type of strong-
minded, completely non-metaphysical man, and in the hands of this type lies
the intellectual and material destiny of each and every "late" period. Such
arc the men who carried through the Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Indian, the
Chinese, the Roman Civilizations, and in such periods do Buddhism, Stoicism,
Socialism ripen into definitive world-conceptions which enable a moribund
humanity to be attacked and re-formed in its intimate structure. Pure Civiliza-
tion, as a historical process, consists in a progressive taking-down of forms that
have become inorganic or dead.

The transition from Culture to Civilization was accomplished for the
Classical world in the 4th, for the Western in the i9th Century. From these
periods onward the great intellectual decisions take place, not as in the days of
the Orpheus-movement or the Reformation in the ' ' whole world ' ' where not
a hamlet is too small to be unimportant, but in three or four world-cities that
have absorbed into themselves the whole content of History, while the old
wide landscape of the Culture, become merely provincial, serves only to feed
the cities with what remains of its higher mankind.

World-city and province 1 the two basic ideas of every civilization bring
up a wholly new form-problem of History, the very problem that we are living
through to-day with hardly the remotest conception of its immensity. In place
of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is
collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and
grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid
masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, reli-
gionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and es-
pecially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman. This is a
very great stride towards the inorganic, towards the end what does it signify?
France and England have already taken the step and Germany is beginning to
do so. After Syracuse, Athens, and Alexandria comes Rome. After Madrid,

1 Sec Vol. II, pp. 117 ct scq.

INTRODUCTION 33

Paris, London come Berlin and New York. It is the destiny of whole regions
that lie outside the radiation-circle of one of these cities of old Crete and
Macedon and to-day the Scandinavian North * to become "provinces."

Of old, the field on which the opposed conception of an epoch came to
battle was some world-problem of a metaphysical, religious or dogmatic kind,
and the battle was between the soil-genius of the countryman (noble, priest)
and the "worldly" patrician genius of the famous old small towns of Doric or
Gothic springtime. Of such a character were the conflicts over the Dionysus
religion as in the tyranny of Kleisthenes of Sikyon 2 and those of the
Reformation in the German free cities and the Huguenot wars. But just as
these cities overcame the country-side (already it is a purely civic world-outlook
that appears in even Parmenides and Descartes), so in turn the world-city over-
came them. It is the common intellectual process of later periods such as the
Ionic and the Baroque, and to-day as in the Hellenistic age which at its
outset saw the foundation of artificial, land-alien Alexandria Culture-cities
like Florence, Niirnberg, Salamanca, Bruges and Prag, have become provincial
towns and fight inwardly a lost battle against the world-cities. The world-
city means cosmopolitanism in place of "home," 3 cold matter-of-fact in place
of reverence for tradition and age, scientific irreligion as a fossil representative
of the older religion of the heart, ' ' society ' ' in place of the state, natural instead
of hard-earned rights. It was in the conception of money as an inorganic and
abstract magnitude, entirely disconnected from the notion of the fruitful earth
and the primitive values, that the Romans had the advantage of the Greeks.
Thenceforward any high ideal of life becomes largely a question of money.
Unlike the Greek stoicism of Chrysippus, the Roman stoicism of Cato and
Seneca presupposes a private income; 4 and, unlike that of the i8th Century,
the social-ethical sentiment of the zoth, if it is to be realized at a higher level
than that of professional (and lucrative) agitation, is a matter for millionaires.
To the world-city belongs not a folk but a mass. Its uncomprehending hostility
to all the traditions representative of the Culture (nobility, church, privileges,
dynasties, convention in art and limits of knowledge in science), the keen and
cold intelligence that confounds the wisdom of the peasant, the new-fashioned
naturalism that in relation to all matters of sex and society goes back far beyond
Rousseau and Socrates to quite primitive instincts and conditions, the reappear-

1 One cannot fail to notice this in the development of Strindberg and especially in that of Ibsen,
who was never quite at home in the civilized atmosphere of his problems. The motives of " Brand "
and " Rosmersholm " are a wonderful mixture of innate provincialism and a theoretically-acquired
megalopolitan outlook. Nora is the very type of the provincial derailed by reading.

2 Who forbade the cult of the town's hero Adrastos and the reading of the Homeric poems, with
the object of cutting the Doric nobility from its spiritual roots (c. 560 B.C.).

3 A profound word which obtains its significance as soon as the barbarian becomes a culture-man
anJ loses it again as soon as the civilization-man takes up the motto "Ubi bene, ibi patria."

\s 4 Hence it was that the first to succumb to Christianity were the Romans who could not afford
to be Stoics. See Vol. II, pp. 607 et seq.

34 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

ance of the pancm et circcnscs in the form of wage-disputes and football-grounds
all these things betoken the definite closing-down of the Culture and the
opening of a quite new phase of human existence anti-provincial, late,
futureless, but quite inevitable.

This is what has to be viewed, and viewed not with the eyes of the partisan,
the ideologue, the up-to-date novelist, not from this or that "standpoint," but
in a high, time-free perspective embracing whole millenniums of historical
world-forms, if we are really to comprehend the great crisis of the present.

To me it is a symbol of the first importance that in the Rome of Crassus -
triumvir and all-powerful building-site speculator the Roman people with
its proud inscriptions, the people before whom Gauls, Greeks, Parthians, Syri-
ans afar trembled, lived in appalling misery in the many-storied lodging-houses
of dark suburbs, 1 accepting with indifference or even with a sort of sporting
interest the consequences of the military expansion: that many famous old-noble
families, descendants of the men who defeated the Celts and the Samnites, lost
their ancestral homes through standing apart from the wild rush of speculation
and were reduced to renting wretched apartments; that, while along the Appian
Way there arose the splendid and still wonderful tombs of the financial mag-
nates, the corpses of the people were thrown along with animal carcases and
town refuse into a monstrous common grave till in Augustus's time it was
banked over for the avoidance of pestilence and so became the site of Maecenas's
renowned park; that in depopulated Athens, which lived on visitors and on the
bounty of rich foreigners, the mob of parvenu tourists from Rome gaped at the
works of the Periclean age with as little understanding as the American globe-
trotter in the Sistine Chapel at those of Michelangelo, every removable art-
piece having ere this been taken away or bought at fancy prices to be replaced
by the Roman buildings which grew up, colossal and arrogant, by the side of
* the low and modest structures of the old time. In such things which it is
the historian's business not to praise or to blame but to consider morphologi-
cally there lies, plain and immediate enough for one who has learnt to see,
an idea.

For it will become manifest that, from this moment on, all great conflicts
of world-outlook, of politics, of art, of science, of feeling will be under the
influence of this one opposition. What is the hall-mark of a politic of Civiliza-
tion to-day, in contrast to a politic of Culture yesterday? It is, for the Classical
rhetoric, and for the Western journalism, both serving that abstract which
represents the power of Civilization money? It is the money-spirit which

1 In Rome and Byzantium, lodging-houses of six to ten stories (with street-widths of ten feet
at most!) were built without any sort of official supervision, and frequently collapsed with all their
inmates. A great part of the cives Romani, for whom panemet circenses constituted all existence, pos-
sessed no more than a high-priced sleeping-berth in one of the swarming ant-hills called insula.
(Pohlraann, Aus Altertum und Gegenwart, 1911, pp. 199 ff.)

Sec Vol. II, 577.

INTRODUCTION 35

penetrates unremarked the historical forms of the people's existence, often with-
out destroying or even in the least disturbing these forms the form of the
Roman state, for instance, underwent very much less alteration between the
elder Scipio and Augustus than is usually imagined. Though forms subsist, the
great political parties nevertheless cease to be more than reputed centres of
decision. The decisions in fact lie elsewhere. A small number of superior heads,
whose names are very likely not the best-known, settle everything, while
below them are the great mass of second-rate politicians rhetors, tribunes,
deputies, journalists selected through a provincially-conceived franchise to
keep alive the illusion of popular self-determination. And art? Philosophy?
The ideals of a Platonic or those of a Kantian age had for the higher mankind
concerned a general validity. But those of a Hellenistic age, or those of our
own, are valid exclusively for the brain of the Megalopolitan. For the villager's
or, generally, the nature-man's world-feeling our Socialism like its near re-
lation Darwinism (how utterly un-Goethian are the formulas of "struggle for
existence" and "natural selection"!), like its other relative the woman-and-
marriage problem of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw, like the impressionistic
tendencies of anarchic sensuousness and the whole bundle of modern longings,
temptations and pains expressed in Baudelaire's verse and Wagner's music
are simply non-existent. The smaller the town, the more unmeaning it becomes

busy oneself with painting or with music of these kinds. To the Culture
belong gymnastics, the tournament, the agon, and to the Civilization belongs
Sport. This is the true distinction between the Hellenic palaestra and the
Roman circus. 1 Art itself becomes a sport (hence the phrase "art for art's
sake") to be played before a highly-intelligent audience of connoisseurs and
buyers, whether the feat consist in mastering absurd instrumental tone-masses
and taking harmonic fences, or in some tour de force of colouring. Then a new
fact-philosophy appears, which can only spare a smile for metaphysical specula-
tion, and a new literature that is a necessity of life for the megalopolitan palate
and nerves and both unintelligible and ugly to the provincials. Neither Alex-
andrine poetry nor plein-air painting is anything to the "people." And, then
as now, the phase of transition is marked by a series of scandals only to be found

such moments. The anger evoked in the Athenian populace by Euripides and
by the "Revolutionary" painting of Apollodorus, for example, is repeated in
the opposition to Wagner, Manet, Ibsen, and Nietzsche.

It is possible to understand the Greeks without mentioning their economic
relations; the Romans, on the other hand, can only be understood through these.
Chasronea and Leipzig were the last battles fought about an idea. In the First
Punic War and in 1870 economic motives are no longer to be overlooked. Not

1 German gymnastics, from the intensely provincial and natural forms imparted to it by Jahn,
has since 1813 been carried by a very rapid development into the sport category. The difference be-
tween a Berlin athletic ground on a big day and a Roman circus was even by 1914 very slight.

36 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

till the Romans came with their practical energy was slave-holding given that
big collective character which many students regard as the die-stamp of Clas-
sical economics, legislation and way of life, and which in any event vastly
lowered both the value and the inner worthiness of such free labour as continued
to exist side by side with gang-labour. And it was not the Latin, but the
Germanic peoples of the West and America who developed out of the steam-
engine a big industry that transformed the face of the land. The relation of
these phenomena to Stoicism and to Socialism is unmistakable. Not till the
Roman Cassarism foreshadowed by C. Flaminius, shaped first by Marius,
handled by strong-minded, large-scale men of fact did the Classical World
learn the pre-eminence of money. Without this fact neither Caesar, nor "Rome"
-'generally, is understandable. In every Greek is a Don Quixote, in every Roman
a Sancho Panza factor, and these factors are dominants.

XIII

Considered in itself, the Roman world-dominion was a negative phenom-
enon, being the result not of a surplus of energy on the one side that the
Romans had never had since Zama but of a deficiency of resistance on the
other. That the Romans did not conquer the world is certain; l they merely
took possession of a booty that lay open to everyone. The Imperium Romanum
came into existence not as the result of such an extremity of military and
financial effort as had characterized the Punic Wars, but because the old East
forwent all external self-determinations. We must not be deluded by the ap-
pearance of brilliant military successes. With a few ill-trained, ill-led, and
sullen legions, Lucullus and Pompey conquered whole realms a phenomenon
that in the period of the battle of Ipsus would have been unthinkable. The
Mithradatic danger, serious enough for a system of material force which had
never been put to any real test, would have been nothing to the conquerors of
Hannibal. After Zama, the Romans never again either waged or were capable
of waging a war against a great military Power. 2 Their classic wars were those
% against the Samnites, Pyrrhus and Carthage. Their grand hour was Cannae.
To maintain the heroic posture for centuries on end is beyond the power of any
people. The Prussian-German people have had three great moments (1813, 1870
and 1914), and that is more than others have had.

uX Here, then, I lay it down that Imperialism, of which petrifacts such as the
Egyptian empire, the Roman, the Chinese, the Indian may continue to exist
for hundreds or thousands of years dead bodies, amorphous and dispirited
masses of men, scrap-material from a great history is to be taken as the
typical symbol of the passing away. Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated.

1 Sec Vol. II, 519.

* The conquest of Gaul by Czsar was frankly a colonial, i.e., a one-sided, war; and the fact
that it is the highest achievement in the later military history of Rome only shows that the well of
real achievement was rapidly drying up.

INTRODUCTION 37

In this phenomenal form the destiny of the West is now irrevocably set. The
energy of culture-man is directed inwards, that of civilization-man outwards.
And thus I see in Cecil Rhodes the first man of a new age. He stands for the
political style of a far-ranging, Western, Teutonic and especially German future,
and his phrase "expansion is everything" is the Napoleonic reassertion of the
indwelling tendency of every Civilization that has fully ripened Roman, Arab
or Chinese. It is not a matter of choice it is not the conscious will of in-
^dividuals, or even that of whole classes or peoples that decides. The expansive
tendency is a doom, something daemonic and immense, which grips, forces into
service, and uses up the late mankind of the world-city stage, willy-nilly, aware
or unaware. 1 Life is the process of effecting possibilities, and for the brain-
man there are only extensive possibilities. 2 Hard as the half-developed Socialism
of to-day is fighting against expansion, one day it will become arch-expansionist
with all the vehemence of destiny. Here the form-language of politics, as the
direct intellectual expression of a certain type of humanity, touches on a deep
metaphysical problem on the fact, affirmed in the grant of unconditional
validity to the causality-principle, that the soul is the complement oj its extension.
When, between 480 and 2.30, 3 the Chinese group of states was tending
towards imperialism, it was entirely futile to combat the principle of Imperi-
alism (Lien-heng), practised in particular by the "Roman" state of Tsin 4 and
theoretically represented by the philosopher Dschang Yi, by ideas of a League
of Nations (Hoh-tsung) largely derived from Wang Hii, a profound sceptic who
had no illusions