A. Top-heavy Tower
The Decline of the West. By trnwin. 21s.) The Decline of the West. By trnwin. 21s.) TuE second volume of Spengler's great work carries to their logical conclusion the ideas of the first. These ideas are by now familiar and it will be sufficient briefly to recall them. Spengler holds that history is to be interpreted as the move- ment of a universal force or consciousness; entitled somewhat ambiguously the " it " or " the Cosmic," which expresses
itself in all the infinite multiplicity of organic life. The " it " evolves by means of " mutations," throwing up in the course of its evolution new forms which exhibit radical differences • from those that have preceded them. The human species is the result of one such mutation, the Culture " of iincithe. For Spengler holds that, just as the lives of individual human beingi exhibit a progressive growth from infancy to old age, so also do the Cultures in which human life finds its communal expression. A Culture is defined as " the waking-being of a single huge organism which makes not only custom, myths, technique and art but the very people and classes incorporated in itself the vessel of one single form-hinguage and one single history." Like the human being, the Culture exhibits growth, but only up to a point ; when a Culture stops growing it becomes a civilization. A civilization is a fixed and static form in which no events of real importance can take place.
" All great political questions are solved . . . inasmuch as questions are no longer felt as questions and are not asked." A civilization thus represents the consummation of a Culture.
Given this fundamental conception of world history, the task of the historian is two-fold : to deal " comparatively with the individual life courses of the Cultures " and to examine " the incidental and irregular relations of the Cultures among themselves." Spengler discerns eight separate Cultures in the recorded history of mankind, and establishes a resemblance between our own, what he calls the Faustian Culture, and the Classical, which, beginning with the Greeks, reaches its consummation as a static civilization in the Roman Empire. The period of the later Roman Republic, from the --:Gracchi to the establishment of the Principate, witnesses the transition from the Culture to the civilization, and it is in this period that Spengler finds the analogue of our own. The path we tread is that which leads from Alexander to Caesar. Napoleon, whose prototype is Sulla, inaugurates the break-up of the traditional Culture form. Then ensues an age of democracy dominated by money power, destined in its turn to give way to a Caesarean dictatorship. For Caesarism is the inevitable outcome of the chaos produced by a democracy which grows ever more unreal, as money power which dominates the Press comes increasingly to dominate the public mind which is the creature of the Press. The democratic rights which our fathers won for us we have neither the inclination nor the ability to use.
" For us," says Spengler, "whom a Destiny has placed in this Culture and at this moment of its development—the moment when money is celebrating its last victories, and the Caesarism that is to succeed approaches with quiet, firm step—our direction willed and obligatory at once is set for us within narrow limits."
That there is a certain glamour about Spengler's work is undeniable. So wide does he cast his intellectual net, so strange and various are the historical fish that he brings to land, that reading him one has the sensation of ascending a lofty tower from which all the kingdoms of history are seen, and, becoming visible, become also intelligible. The process is an exhilarating one, and the impressionable reader is apt
to lose his head. I remember how the enthusiasm engendered by my own reading of the first volume of the Decline of the Oswald Spengler. (Allen and ll'est found expression in an enraptured review in the Spectator, which subsequent reflection condemned .as extravagant. —
For. Spengler's work, impressive as it undoubtedly is, suffers -from two defects. The first is inaccuracy. Spengler writes as an expert in a number of different fields ; mathematics, contrapuntal music, credit economics, classical - courage, Chinese history, -modern -biological research, to name only a few, all figure prominently in his work. -Now I have noticed -time and again- that experts in one particular field, impressed -by Spengler's achievement- in- all the others, ford serious fault with his performance in their own. Spengler, in short,-has been repeatedly challenged- on points of fact, and,- so far as
I know, the challenge -has gone unanswered. -
As a philosopher expert in no field, and consequently beglamoured by Spengler in all of them, I can only find -fault with his logic. And here the charge, one of inconsistency and self-contradiction, is serious. -I will take an example.
Early in his book Spengler stresses the obvious point that all history is in a sense subjective, our view of any period being coloured by the circumstances and limitations of our own. " There is," he says, no history -in- itself." This subjectivism, however, is not to be deplored. " It is not incompatible with, rather it is essential to a profound-knowledge of men, that the appraiser should see through glasses of his own colour."
In the next line, however, Marxians are indicted because the materialist conception of history, being objective, lacks the virtue claimed for the subjective. -Now it may, of course, be true that our vision of history must of necessity be distorted, though most of us would hold that we approximate to historical truth as we progressively eliminate the distortion. But if it is the case that historical vision must be distorted, why is the materialist conception criticized because it is not ?
The second defect is obscurity. Spengler's writing is often vivid and picturesque. His work, indeed, is studded with aphorisms and epigrams, which are less the product of verbal dexterity than of the logical drive of his thought seeking forceful expression. Thus he concludes a passage on the power of the modern Press to mould public thought while inhibiting private thinking :—" Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot ; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty." Discussing the limits of human thinking he writes, " Can criticism . . . solve the great questions, or can it merely pose them ? At the beginning of knoviledge we think the former. But the more we know the more certain we become of the latter. So long as we hope we call the secret a problem."
These are examples of his style at its best. More frequently, -however, he lapses into a pompous unintelligibility which reflects less the difficulty of what he is saying than his own inability to say it properly. It is not so much the expression of obscurity, which is pardonable, as obscurity of expression, which is not. What, for example, are we to make of sentences such as " The struggle for the Caesar title becomes more and more negroid and might have gone on century after century in increasingly primitive and, therefore, ' eternal ' forms " ? Or this on the consummation of Caesarism ? " It is the red- dive of a form-fulfilled world into primitiveness, into the cosmic history-less." Now I cannot avoid the suspicion that factual inaccuracies, tricks of reasoning and an obscurity which at times seems almost deliberate, have played no small part in building up the impressive structure of Spengler's world history. It may well be that without them it would fall to
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