corresponds to a similar period in all other cultures, we have first of all a new and amusing concept of "contemporaneity"; but in the second place this signifies for the initiate an astronomical certainty concerning the outcome of the future. For instance, it is quite certain what is in store for our own culture, the Occidental, which passed into the old age of civilization at the beginning of the nineteenth century and whose immediate future will be "contemporary" with the century of the Roman soldier-emperors. It is certain, astronomically, biologically, morphologically. It is frightfully certain. And if there is anything more frightful than this destiny, then it is the man who bears it without raising a finger in protest.
Yet our steely savant calls on us to do this very thing. We must will the inevitable or nothing, he says; and he does not notice that this is not an alternative and that the man who wills only that which a pitiless science declares to be inevitable simply ceases to will—which, further, is not very human. What, then, is this inevitable? It is the decay of the Occident, the promise of coming wretchedness—not precisely decay sans phrase, not in the physical sense, although a great deal of physical decay will be bound up with it as well—but the decay of the Occident as a culture. Even a China still exists, and millions of Chinese are living; but the Chinese culture is dead. The same is true of Egypt which since the time of the Romans has been inhabited not by Egyptians, a national and cultural entity, but by fellaheen. According to Spengler fellahdom is the final stage in the life of each people. A people, when its culture has gone through its life-cycle, falls into fellahdom, and becomes without history, just as it was as a primitive people. But the intellectual-political-economic instrument which produces this condition is civilization, the spirit of the city. For it brings into prominence the concept of a fourth estate, the masses. And the masses—which no longer constitute a people—the nomadic life of the great urban centres . . . all that is formlessness, the end, nothing. For the Occident, as for every culture, the advent of formless, traditionless forces (Napoleon) occurs concomitantly with the beginning of civilization. But Napoleonism turns into Caesarism, parliamentary democracy into the dictatorship of specific men who are born and bred as tyrants, unscrupulous economic conquistadors of the type of a Cecil Rhodes. The stage of Caesarism is to be observed in all failing cultures, and lasts a full two hundred years.
