Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/768

des Abendlandes. I do this since I rely on the world-wide fame which this work has attained, thanks to powerful qualities which no one denies it. His doctrine, briefly and roughly stated, is this: History is the life-process of vegetative and structural organisms which are known as cultures and which possess an individual physiognomy and a limited period of existence. Up to the present eight of these cultures can be counted: Egyptian, Indian, Babylonian, Chinese, Graeco-Roman, Arabic, Occidental (our own) and the culture of the Mayas in Central America. But although alike in their general structure and their general destiny, these cultures are strictly isolated existences, each one inseparably bound to its own laws of thinking, seeing, and experiencing, and none of them understands a word of what any of the others says or means. Only Herr Spengler understands them, conglomerately and individually, and it is a real pleasure to observe how he can speak and sing of each of them. Aside from this, as has been said, the deepest incomprehensibility reigns; and it is ludicrous to speak of any continuity in life, of that ultimate spiritual unity, that humanity, which—according to Novalis—is the star, the purer meaning of our planet, and which binds it as a member to the upper world. There is no use recalling that a single work of love—I like Mahler's Lied von der Erde, which makes a complete organic, human fusion between the old Chinese lyric and the most complex phases of modern musical development—throws overboard the whole theory of any radical estrangement between cultures. Since there is no one type of mankind—according to Spengler—there is also no one system of mathematics, or painting, or physics; but there are as many systems of mathematics, painting, and physics as there are cultures . . . And they are all fundamentally different things, a Babylonian muddle of tongues. Except that, once again, Herr Spengler is graced with the intuition for understanding them all. Each culture, he says, runs through the life-cycle of an individual man. Born out of a maternal landscape, it blossoms, ripens, wilts, and dies. It dies after it has completely lived out its character, after it has exhausted all the picturesque possibilities of expression contained in its nature, such as: nations, religions, literatures, arts, sciences, and forms of government. The old age of each culture—marking the transition to annihilation, to a death of torpor, to an existence without history—we term "civilization." But since each period in a culture's age