Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/12

 found in Spengler’s vast ordered multitude of facts, Eduard Meyer honourably bears testimony to our author's “erstauniich umfangreiches, chm standsg


 * prasentes, Wissen" Ca phrase as neat and as untranslatable as Gocthe's “‘exakte

' syanliche Phantasie’’) He insists upon the fruitfulness of certain of Spengler’s ideas such as that of the ‘‘Second Religtousness *” Above all, he adheres to and covers with his high authority the basic idea of the parallelism of organtcally- Irving Cultures It 1s 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 bemg en organic structure of the Cultures, ¢ morphology of History, he ranges himself frankly by the side of the younger thinker, whose work he sums up as a “*blerbendes 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 gualsty of Spengler's work Its influence 1s far deeper and subtler than any to which the conventional adjective “‘suggestive’’ could be applied. It cannot tn fact be described by adjectives at all, but only denoted or adumbrated by its result, which 1s that, after studying and mastering 1t, one finds 1¢ nearly if not quite impossible to approach any culcure-problem — old or new, dog- matic of artistic, political or scientific — without conceiving 1t primarily as “thorphological "

The work comprises two volumes — under the respeettve sub-titles “Form and Reahry’* and ‘*World-historical Perspectives’ — of which the present translation covers the first only Some day I hope to have the opportumity of completing a task which becomes — such 1s the nature of this book — mote attractive in proportion to 1s difficulty References to Volume II are, for the present, necessarily to the pages of the German original, 1f, as 1s hoped, thts translation zs 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 m more derail the points of fact which Spengler, with his “‘standig prasentes Wissen,’’ sweeps alongin his course This being their object, they take the form, 1n the majority of cases, of references to appropriate articles in the Encyclopadia Britannica, which 1s the only single work that both contains reasonably full information on the varied (and often abstruse) matters alluded to, and 1s likely to be, acces-

_ stble wherever this book may penetrate Every reader no doubr will find these notes, where they appertain to his own special subject, trivial and even annoy- ing, but st 1s thought that, for example, an explanation of the mathematical Limit may be helpful ro a student who knows all about the Katharsis in Greek drama, and vze¢ versa