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Rh ualizes form, and gives rise to a type of book which, if I am not mistaken, is the most prominent with us at present and which might be called the "intellectual novel." In this class belong works like the Reisetagebuch Eines Philosophen by Count Hermann Keyserling, the beautiful Neitzsche-book by Ernest Bertram, and the monumental Goethe of Gundolf, the prophet of Stefan George. And on account of its literary brilliance and the intuitive-rhapsodical nature of its treatment of culture, Spengler's Untergang belongs here unquestionably. Its effect has been by far the most sensational; and it has certainly fallen in perfectly with that wave of "historical pessimism" which is quite naturally—as Benedetto Croce said—moving across Germany.

Spengler denies that he is a pessimist. Nor is he any more willing to be termed an optimist. He is a fatalist. But his fatalism—summed up in the sentence, "We must will either the inevitable, or nothing"—is far removed from the tragic-heroic character, the Dionysian, in which Nietzsche dissolved the opposition between pessimism and optimism. It bears rather the character of a malicious apodicticity and of a hostility to the future masking under the guise of a scientific relentlessness. It is not amor fati. Precisely amor is the least of his concerns—and that is what makes the work repulsive. The question is not one of pessimism or optimism: one can have very dark thoughts on the fate of man, who is perhaps eternally condemned or devoted to suffering. When the talk is of "happiness," of some suppositional "happiness" waiting for us somewhere or other, one can ensconce oneself in the deepest pessimism; without acquiring thereby the least touch of that professional uncongeniality which marks the Spenglerian pessimism. Pessimism is not coldness. It does not necessarily mean a clammily "scientific" charting of a process and the inimical unconcern with such imponderabilia as are offered by the human mind and the human will inasmuch as they add to a process just that element of irrationality, perhaps, which lifts it beyond the reach of scientific calculations. But Spengler stands for just such presumptions and just such disinterest in the human equation. If only he were frightfully cynical! But he is merely "fatal." And it is unfair of him to name Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche as the precursors of his hyena-like pontifications. They were men. But he is simply a defeatist of humanity.

I am speaking as though my audience had read the Untergang