The 20th Century Historical Outlook

3 Perspective Far out in exterior darkness where no breath stirs, no light shines, and no sound is heard, one can glance toward this spinning earth-ball. In the astral regions, illumination is of the soul, hence all is dark but this certain star, and only a part of it is aglow. From such a distance, one can obtain an utterly untrammeled view of what is transpiring on this earth-ball. Drawing somewhat closer, continents are visible; closer yet, population-streams. One focal point exists whence the light goes forth in all directions. It is the crooked peninsula of Europe. On this tiny pendant of the great land-mass of the earth-ball, the greatest intensity of movement exists. One can see — for out here the soul and its emanations are visible — a concentration of ideas, energy, ambition, purpose, expansiveness, will-to-form. Hovering above Europe we can see what never before was so clearly visible — the presence of a purely spiritual organism. A close look reveals that the light stream is not flowing from the surface of Europe upward into the night sky, but downward from the hitherto invisible organism. This is a discovery of profound

4 and revolutionary importance, which was only vouchsafed to us by reason of our complete detachment from terrestrial events in the outer void, where spirit is visible and matter visible, only by reason of the light from the spirit. More discoveries follow: on the other side are two islands, small in comparison with the land-mass. The pale glow diffused over isolated parts of these two islands is seen at once to be a reflection from the other side. What is this supra-terrestrial phenomenon? Why does it hover over Europe in particular? What is the relationship between it and the human material under it? The latter is shaped up into intricately formed pyramidal structures. Ranks are formed. Movements proceed along channels of labyrinthine complexity. Persons stand to one another in defined relationships of command and obedience. Apart from this tiny peninsula, the human currents are horizontal, swirling, eddying like the water in the streams, the currents in the ocean, the herds on the vast plains. It is, then, the spirit-organism which forms and impresses the population of the peninsula into their intricate organic shapes. With what can we compare this being, which could not be seen by us while we were earth-bound? It is alone at present. But out here we have the freedom of time as well as the freedom of space. We are allowed to look upon a hundred generations as the earth-bound look upon the life-span of a fruit-fly. In our search for something similar to the spirit-organism we have seen, we go back two hundred generations. The ball is the same, but is in almost complete darkness. Things are almost indistinguishable; matter has not passed through the alembic of spirit, and is not apprehensible. A glance backward reveals a continuation of the void. We let a few generations pass in a moment, and spirit begins to make itself felt. A feeble, but

5 promising, glow appears in northeast Africa. Then another, a thousand miles to the northeast, in Mesopotamia. They take names, Egypt, Babylonia. The time is around 3000 B.C. They increase in intensity and the first thing clear in each case is armies marching against the outer populations, who are felt as the barbarian. These spiritual organisms do not mix — their higher frontiers are sharp and clear; each being has its own hue, which adheres to it. Each organism seizes the human material in its landscape and impresses them into its service. First it gives them a common World-Idea, then it refines this into nations, each nation embodying a separate idea of the higher organism. A nobility and priesthood arise to embody different aspects of the idea. The populations are stratified and specialized, and the human beings live out their lives and destinies in a way entirely subordinate to the higher organism. The latter compels these humans with ideas. Only a small spiritual stratum of each human population is adapted to this kind of compulsion, but those who belong to it remain in the service of the idea, once it is felt. They will live and die for it, and in the process they determine the destinies of the population whence they spring. These ideas — not mere abstractions, strings of concepts, but living, pulsating, wordless necessities of being and thinking — are the technic by which these higher beings utilize human beings for their purposes. Religions of high complexity of feeling and rationale, forms of architecture, conceived in the spirit of that religion and put into its service, lyric poetry, pictorial art, sculpture, music, orders of nobility, orders of priesthood, stylized dwellings, stylized manners and dress, rigid training of the young up to these developments to perpetuate them, systems of philosophy, of mathematics, of knowledge, of nature, prodigious technical methods, giant battles, huge armies, prolonged wars, energetic economics to support this whole multifarious

6 structure, intricately organized governments to infuse order into the nations created by the higher being acting on the different types of human material — these are some of the floraison of forms which appear in these two areas. Each form is different in Egypt from the corresponding form in Babylonia . If an idea is taken over, it is only apparently adopted; actually it is misunderstood, re-formed, and adapted to the proper soul. But the higher being approaches a crisis. It has expended itself in this earth-transforming process. It shudders, it apparently weakens, it palpitates — chaos and anarchy threaten its terrestrial actualizations — forces outside gather to strike it down and wipe out its grand creations. But it rouses itself, it puts forward its greatest effort of all — no longer in the creation of inward things, arts, philosophy, theories of life, but in the formation of the purely external apparatus of power: strict governments, giant armies, industry to support them, fleets of ships for war, legal systems to organize and order the conquests. It expands across areas never before investigated or even known, it unifies all of its proper nations into one, which gives its name to the rest and leads them on to the last great expansive effort. The same great rhythm is observable in each of them. As one watches, the two lights die down from their splendid hues to an ever-paler earth-light. They go out slowly, leaving a glow of memory and legend in the minds of men, and with their last great creations lying in the widened landscape — Imperium. Outside these two areas, the rest of the earth has remained unchanged. The human bands are distinguishable from the herding-animals only by a primitive culture, and a more intricate economy. Otherwise their existence-forms are devoid of significance. The primitive cultures are the sole thing existing above the plane of economics, in that they attribute symbolic significance to natural occurrences and human conduct. But

7 there is nothing in these movements resembling the High Cultures which transformed the entire appearance of the Egyptian and Babylonian landscapes for almost forty generations from their first beginning until the last sinking. Physical time flows on and centuries pass in darkness. Then, precisely as in Egypt and Babylonia, but again of a different hue, and to different music, a light appears over the Punjab . It becomes bright and firm. The same wealth of forms and significant happenings work themselves out as in the earlier two organisms. Its creations are all in the highest degree individual, as different from its two predecessors as they were vis-à-visone another, but they follow the same grand rhythms. The same multi-colored pageant of nobles and priests, temples and schools, nations and cities, arts and philosophies, armies and sciences, letters and wars, passes before the eye. II Before this high culture was well on its way, another had started to actualize itself in the Hwang-Ho valley in China . And then a few centuries later, about 1100 B.C. in our way of reckoning, the Classical Culture begins on the shores of the Aegean. Both of these cultures have the stamp of individuality, their own way of coloring and influencing their terrestrial creations, but both are subject to the same morphology as the others observed. As this Classical Culture draws to its close, around the time of Christ, another one appears in a landscape subjugated by the Classical in its last expansive phase — Arabia. The fact of its appearance precisely here makes its course an unusual one. Its forms are inwardly as pure as those of all the other Cultures, inwardly it borrows nothing any more than they did — but it was

8 inevitable that the material contiguity of landscape, temporal succession, and contact with the civilized populations of the older organism would influence the new soul to take over the wealth of classical creations. It was subjugated to them only in a superficial way however, for into these old bottles it poured its new wine. Through selection, reinterpretation, or ignoring, it expressed its own soul despite the alien forms. In its later, expansive phase, this culture embraced European Spain as the Western Caliphate. Its life span, its end form, its last great crisis — all followed the same organic regularity as the others. Some five centuries later the now familiar manifestations of another High Culture begin in the remote landscapes of Mexico and Peru . It is to have the most tragic destiny of any we have yet seen. Around 1000 A.D. the European Culture is meanwhile born, and at its very birth shows itself to be distinguished from the others by the extraordinary intensity of its self-expression, by its pushing into every distance both in the spiritual realm, and in the physical. Its original landscape was even of an extent many times the size of its predecessors, and from this base, in its middle life, it enters upon an Age of Discovery, in which it finds for itself the very frontiers of the earth-ball, and converts the world into the object of its politics. Its Spanish representatives in the two warrior bands of Cortez and Pizarro discovered the Civilization of Mexico and Peru, then in its very last stage of refinement of the material life. The two grand Empires of Mexico and Peru, with social forms, economico-political organization, transportation, communication, city life, all developed to the utmost limits for this particular soul made the invading Spaniards seem like mere naive barbarians. But the technical disinterestedness of these empires left them helpless before the few cannon and horses of the invaders. The last act of this Culture-drama is its obliteration in a few years by the invaders

9 from another world. This consummation is instructive as to the attention that the World-Spirit pays to human values and feelings. What soothsayer would have dared to tell the last Aztec Emperor, surrounded with the pomp of world-historical significance, clothed with the power of the world, that in a short time the jungle would reconquer his cities and palaces, that his armies and systems of control of his world-Empire would vanish before the onslaught of a few hundred barbarians? Each Culture-soul is stamped with individuality; from the others it takes nothing, and to them it gives nothing. Whatever is on its frontiers is the enemy, whether primitive or Culture-populations. They all are barbarians, heathens, to the proper culture, and no understanding passes between them. We saw the Western peoples prove the lifeworthiness of the European culture by their crusades against the highly civilized Saracens, Moors, and Turks. We saw the Germanic populations in the East and their Visigothic brothers in the South push the barbarian Slavs and the civilized Moors continually back during the centuries. We saw Western ships and Western armies make the whole world into the object of booty for the West. These were the relations of the West to that and those outside. Within the Culture arose Gothic Christianity, the transcendent symbols of Empire and Papacy, the Gothic cathedrals, the unlocking of the secrets of the world of the soul and the world of nature in monastery cells. The Culture-soul shaped for its own expression the nations of the West. To each it gave individuality, and at the last, each thought it was a Culture in itself, instead of being a mere organ of a Culture. Cities grew out of the hamlets of Gothic times, and from the cities grew intellect. The old problem of the relation of Reason and Faith, the central problem of early Scholastic, is apparently being slowly decided in these cities in favor of the Supremacy of Reason.

10 The nobility of Gothic times, the masters of the earth who had no superior unless they voluntarily recognized him, become subject to an idea — the State. Life slowly externalizes: political problems move into the center; new economic resources are developed to support the political contests; the old agricultural economy metamorphoses into an industrial economy. At the end of this path stands a ghostly and terrifying Idea: Money. Other Cultures also had seen this phenomenon appear at the same stage and grow to similar dimensions. Its slow growth in importance proceeds pari passe with the gradual self-assertion of Reason against Faith. It reaches its highest point with the Age of Nationalism, when the parts of the Culture tear one another to bits, even as outer dangers loom threateningly. At its highest point, Money, allied with Rationalism, contests for the supremacy over the life of the Culture with the forces of State and Tradition, Society and Religion. In our brief visit to interstellar space, we found the position of detachment whence we could see this grand life-drama unfold itself seven times in seven High Cultures, and we saw each of the seven surmount the last great crisis of two centuries’ duration. The Mexican-Peruvian Civilization overcame the inner crisis only to fall before marauders appearing out of the blue sea. The great crisis of the West set in forcefully with the French Revolution and its consequent phenomena. Napoleon was the symbol of the transition of Culture into Civilization — Civilization, the life of the material, the external, of power, giant economies, armies, and fleets, of great numbers and colossal technics, over Culture, the inner life of religion, philosophy, arts, domination of the external life of politics and economics by strict form and symbolism, strict restraint of the beast-of-prey in man, feeling of cultural unity. It is the victory of Rationalism, Money and the great city over the traditions of religion and authority, of Intellect over Instinct.

11 We had seen all this in the previous high cultures as they approached their final life-phase. In each case the crisis had been resolved by the resurgence of the old forces of Religion and Authority, their victory over Rationalism and Money, and the final union of the nations into an Imperium. The two-century-long crisis in the life of the great organism expressed itself in gigantic wars and revolutions. All the Cultural energy that had previously gone into inner creations of thought, religion, philosophy, science, art-forms, great literature, now goes into the outer life of economics, war, technics, politics. The symbolism of power succeeds to the highest place in this last phase. But at this point, we are suddenly back on the surface of the earth. No longer detached, we must participate in the great Culture-drama, whether we will or no. Our only choice is to participate as subject or as object. The wisdom that comes from the knowledge of the organic nature of a High Culture gives us the key to the events transpiring before our eyes. It can be applied by us, and our action can thereby become significant, as distinguished from the opportunistic and old-fashioned policy of stupidity which would try to turn the Western Civilization back in its course because stupid heads are incapable of adjusting themselves to new prevailing ideas. III With the knowledge of the organic nature of a High Culture, we have achieved an unparalleled liberation from the dross of materialism which hindered hitherto the glimpse into History’s riddle. This knowledge is simple, but profound, and is therefore shut off from the inward appreciation of all but the few. In its train flow all the consequences of the necessary historical outlook of the coming times. Since a Culture is organic, it has an individuality, and a soul. Thus it cannot be influenced in its

12 depths from any outside force whatever. It has a destiny, like all organisms. It has a period of gestation, and a birth-time. It has a growth, a maturity, fulfillment, a down-going, a death. Because it has a soul, all of its manifestations will be impressed by the same spiritual stamp, just as each man’s life is the creation of his own individuality. Because it has a soul, this particular culture can never come again after it has passed. Like the nations it creates to express phases of its own life, it exists only once. There will never be another Indian culture, Aztec-Mayan Culture, Classical Culture, or Western Culture, any more than there will be a second Spartan nation, Roman nation, French or English nation. Since a Culture is organic, it has a life-span. We observed this life span: it is about thirty-five generations at highest potential, or about forty-five generations from its first stirrings in the landscape until its final subsiding. Like the life span of organisms, it is no rigid thing. Man has a life span of seventy years, but this term is not rigid. The High Cultures belong at the peak of the organic hierarchy: plant, animal, man. They differ from the other organisms in that they are invisible, or in other words, they have no light-quality. In this they resemble the human soul. The body of a High Culture is made up of the population streams in its landscape. They furnish it with the material through which it actualizes its possibilities. The spirit which animates these populations shows the life-phase of the Culture, whether youthful, mature, or at the last fulfillment. Like each man, a Culture has ages, which succeed one another with rhythmic inevitability. They are laid down for it by its own organic law, just as the senility of a man is laid down at his conception. This quality of direction we call Destiny. Destiny is the hallmark of everything living. Destiny-thinking is the type of thought which understands the living, and it is the only kind which does. The other

13 method of human thought is that of Causality. This method is inwardly compulsory in dealing with inorganic problems of technics, mechanics, engineering, systematic natural philosophy. It finds the limits of its efficacy there, however, and is grotesque when applied to Life. It would tell us that youth is the cause of maturity, maturity of old age, that the bud is the cause of the full-blown flower, the caterpillar the cause of the butterfly. The Destiny-Idea is the central motive of organic thinking. If anyone thinks it is merely an invisible causality, he understands it not. The idea of Causality is the central motive of systematic, or inorganic thinking. The latter is scientific thinking. It aims at subjugation of things to understanding; it wishes to name everything, to make outlines distinct, and then to link phenomena together by classification and causal linkage. Kant is the height of this type of thinking, and to this side of Western philosophy belong also Hume, Bacon, Schopenhauer, Hamilton, Spencer, Mill, Bentham, Locke, Holbach, Descartes. To the organic side belong Macchiavelli, Vico, Montaigne, Leibnitz, Lichtenberg, Pascal, Hobbes, Goethe, Hegel, Carlyle, Nietzsche and Spengler, the philosopher of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Scientific thinking is at the height of its power in the realm of matter, that which possesses extension, but no direction. Material happenings can be controlled, are reversible, produce identical results under identical conditions, are recurrent, can be classified, can be successfully comprehended as though they are subject to an a priori, mechanical, necessity, in other words, to Causality. Scientific thinking is powerless in the domain of Life, for its happenings are uncontrollable, irreversible, never-recurring, unique, cannot be classified, are unamenable to rational treatment, and possessed of no external, mechanical necessity. Every

14 organism is something never seen before, that follows an inner necessity, that passes away, never to reappear. Every organism is a set of possibilities within a certain framework, and its life is the process of actualization of these possibilities. The technique of Destiny-thinking is simply living into other organisms to understand their life-conditions and necessities. One can then apprehend what must happen. The word Fate is an inorganic word. It is an attempt to subjugate Life to an external necessity; it is of religious provenance, and religion comes from the causal type of thinking. There is no science without a precedent religion. Science merely makes the sacred causality of religion into a profane, mechanical necessity. Fate is not synonymous with destiny, but the opposite to it. Fate attributes necessity to the incidents of a life, but Destiny is the inner necessity of the organism. An incident can wipe out a life, and thus terminate its destiny, but this event came from outside the organism, and was thus apart from its destiny. Every fact is an incident, unforeseeable and incalculable, but the inner progression of a life is destined, and works itself out through the facts, is helped or hindered by them, overcomes them, or succumbs to them. It is the destiny of every child that is born ultimately to become senile; incident may intervene in the form of disease or accident, and this destiny may be frustrated. These outer incidents — that may elevate a man to the heights despite his blunders, or cast him into defeat despite his efficiency and mastery of the idea of his time are without meaning for Destiny-thinking. Destiny inheres in the organism, forces it to express its possibilities. Incident is outside the organism, is blind, uninformed by necessity, but may nevertheless play a great role in the actualization of an organism, by smoothing its way, or imposing

15 great obstacles to it. What is called Luck, Doom, Fate, Providence, express the bafflement and awe of men in the presence of this mistery, forever unknowable. Destiny-thinking and Causality-thinking are related to one another, however, through their common provenance: both are products of Life. Even the most inorganic thinker or scientifico, the crassest materialist or mechanist, is subject to his own destiny, his own soul, his own character, his own life span, and outside this framework of destiny his free, unbound flight of causal fancy cannot deliver him. Destiny is Life, but Causality is merely a thought-method by which a certain form of Life, namely Culture-man, attempts to subjugate all around him to his understanding. Thus there is an order of rank between them: Destiny-thinking is unconditionally prior, for all Life is subject to it, while Causality-thinking is only an expression of a part of Life’s possibilities. Their differences may also be expressed in this way: Causality-thought is able to understand because its non-living material opposes no resistance, but submits to any conditions imposed upon it, having no inner compulsion of its own. When, however, Causality attempts to subjugate Life, the material itself is active, moving independently, will not stand still and be classified or systematized. Destiny-thinking can understand because each one of us is himself moved by Destiny, has an inner compulsion to be himself, and can thus, by transference of inwardly-experienced feelings, live himself into other forms of life, other individuations. Destiny-thinking moves along with its subject-matter; Causality stands still, and can only reach satisfactory conclusions with subject-matter that is also standing still. Just as even the most highly developed systematizers are subject to Destiny, so do they — all unwittingly — apply Destiny-thinking

16 in their daily lives and relationships with other human beings. The most rabid reflexologist unconsciously applies some of the psychological wisdom of the Abbe Galiani or Rochefoucauld, even though he has never heard of these seers of the soul.

17 The Two Aspects of History The total difference between the methods of human thinking represented by the central-ideas of Destiny on the one hand, and Causality on the other, was sharply accented for the reason that only one of them is adapted to the understanding of History. History is the record of fulfilled destinies — of Cultures, nations, religions, philosophies, sciences, mathematics, art-forms, great men. Only the feeling of empathy can understand these once-living souls from the bare records left. Causality is helpless here, for at every second a new fact is cast into the pool of Life, and from its point of impact, ever-widening circles of changes spread out. The subterranean facts are never written down, but every fact changes the course of the history of facts. The true understanding of any organism, whether a High Culture, a nation, or a man, is to see behind and underneath the facts of that existence the soul which is expressing itself by means of, and often in opposition to, the external happenings. Only so can one separate what is significant from what is unimportant.

18 Significant thus is seen to mean: having a Destiny-quality. Incidental means: without relationship to Destiny. It was Destiny for Napoleon that Carnot was Minister of War, for another man would probably not have seen Napoleon’s project for an invasion of Italy through the Ligurian Hills, buried as it was in the files of the Ministry. It was a Destiny for France that the author of the plan was a man of action as well as a theoretician. It is thus obvious that the feeling for what is Destiny and what is Incident have a high subjective content, and that a deeper insight can make out Destiny where the more superficial sees only Incident. Men are thus differentiated also with regard to their capacity for understanding History. There is an historical sense, which can see behind the surface of history to the soul that is the determinant of this history. History, seen through the historical sense of a human being, has thus a subjective aspect. This is the first aspect of History. The other, the objective, aspect of History, is equally incapable of rigid establishment, even though at first glance it might seem to be. The writing of purely objective history is the aim of the so-called reference, or narrative, method of presenting history. Nevertheless, it inevitably selects and orders the facts, and in this process the poetic intuition, historical sense, and flair of the author come into play. If these are totally excluded, the product is not history-writing, but a book of dates, and this, again, cannot be free from selection. Nor is it history. The genetic method of writing history attempts to set forth the developments with complete impartiality. It is the narrative method with some type of causal, evolutionary, or organic philosophy superimposed to trace the growth of the subsequent out of the precedent. This fails to attain objectivity because the facts that survive may be either too

19 few or too numerous, and in either case artistry must be employed in filling gaps or selecting. Nor is impartiality possible. It is the historical sense which decides importance of past developments, past ideas, past great men. For centuries, Brutus and Pompey were held to be greater than Caesar. Around 1800, Vulpius was considered a greater poet than Goethe. Mengs, whom we have forgotten, was ranked in his day as one of the great painters of the world. Shakespeare, until more than a century after his death, was considered inferior as a playwright to more than one of his contemporaries. El Greco was unnoticed 75 years ago. Cicero and Cato were both held, until after the First World War, to be great men, rather than Culture-retarding weaklings. Joan of Arc was not included in Chastellain’s list, drawn up on the death of Charles VII, of all the army commanders who fought against England . Lastly, for the benefit of readers of 2050, I may say that the Hero and the Philosopher of the period 1900-1950 were both invisible to their contemporaries in the historical dimensions in which you see them. The Classical Culture looked one way to Wincklemann’s time, another way to Nietzsche’s time, yet another way to the 20th and 21st centuries. Similarly, Elizabethan England was satisfied with Shakespeare’s dramatization of Plutarch’s Caesar, whereas fin-de-siécle England required Shaw to dramatize Mommsen’s Caesar. Wilhelm Tell, Maria Stuart, Götz von Berlichingen, Florian Geyer, all would have to be written differently today, for we see these historical periods from a different angle. What then, is History? History is the relationship between the Past and the Present. Because the Present is constantly changing, so is History. Each Age has its own History, which the Spirit of the Age creates to fit its own soul. With the passing

20 of that Age, never to return, that particular History picture has passed. Seen from this standpoint, any attempt to write History “as it really happened” is historical immaturity, and the belief in objective standards of history-presentation is self-deception, for what will come forth will be the Spirit of the Age. The general agreement of contemporaries with a certain outlook on History does not make that outlook objective, but only gives it rank — the highest possible rank it can have as an accurate expression of the Spirit of the Age, true for this time and this soul. A higher degree of truth cannot be attained, this side of divinity. Anyone who prates of being “modern” must remember that he would have felt just as modern in the Europe of Charles V, and that he is doomed to become just as “old-fashioned” to the men of 2050 as are the men of 1850 to him. A journalistic view of History stamps its possessor as lacking in the historical sense. He should therefore refrain from talking of historical matters, whether past or in the process of becoming.

21 The Relativity of History History must always have its subjective aspect, and its objective aspect. But the determining thing is always neither the one, nor the other, but simply the relationship between the two. Each of the first two aspects can be arbitrary, but the relationship is not arbitrary, but is the expression of the Spirit of the Age, and is therefore true, historically speaking. Each of the eight Cultures which passed in brilliant review before us had its own relationship to History generally, and this relationship developed in a certain direction through the life-course of the Culture. It is only necessary to mention the Classical in this connection. Tacitus, Plutarch, Livy, Suetonius were regarded as historical thinkers by the Romans. To us they are simply story-tellers, totally lacking in the historical sense. This could not be a reflection on them, but only tells us something about ourselves. Our view of History is as intense, fierce, probing and extensive, as the whole cast of our Western soul generally. If there were ten millennia of history instead of five, we would find it necessary to orient ourselves to the whole ten instead of to the mere five.

22 Not only are the Cultures differentiated from one another also in their historical sense, but the various Ages within the Culture’s development are so distinguished. Although all tendencies exist in all the Ages, it is nevertheless correct to say that one certain Life-tendency dominates any one Age. Thus in all Cultures, the religious feeling is uppermost in the first great Life-phase, lasting some five centuries, and is then superseded by the critical spirituality, lasting somewhat less long, to be succeeded by the historical outlook, which gradually merges again into the final rebirth of religion. The three Life-tendencies are, successively, sacred, profane, and skeptical. They parallel the political phases of Feudalism, corresponding to religion; Absolute State, and Democracy, corresponding to early and late Critical philosophy; and Resurgence of Authority and Caesarism, the counterparts of skepsis and rebirth of religion. The intra-Cultural development of the idea of Science, or Natural Philosophy, is from Theology through, in succession, physical sciences and biology, to pure, untheoretical, Nature-manipulation, the scientific counterpart of skepsis and resurgent authority. The Age which succeeds to the Age of Democracy can only see its predecessors under their purely historical aspect. This is the only way it can feel itself as related to them. This too, however, as will be apparent, has its imperative side. Culture-man is always a unity, and the mere fact that one Life-tendency is uppermost cannot destroy this organic unity. In all Ages, the individuals therein are separated from one another also by their varying development of the historical sense. Think of the different historical horizon of Frederick II and one of his Sicilian courtiers, of Cesare Borgia and one of his captains, of Napoleon and Nelson, of Mussolini and his

23 assassin. A political unit in the custody of a man with no historical horizon, an opportunist, must pay with its wasted blood for his lack. Just as the Western Culture has the most intensely historic soul, so does it develop men with the greatest historical sense. It is a Culture which has always been conscious of its own history. At each turning-point there were many who knew the significance of the moment. Both sides, in any Western opposition, have felt themselves as clothed with and determining the Future. Therefore Western men have been under the necessity of having a History-picture in which to think and act. The fact that the Culture was continually changing meant that History was continually changing. History is the continuous reinterpretation of the Past. History is thus continually “true,” because, in each Age, the ruling historical outlook and values are the expression of the proper soul. The alternatives for History are not true or false, but effective or ineffective. Truth in the religio-philosophical-mathematical sense, meaning timelessly, eternally valid, dissociated from the conditions of Life, does not pertain to History. History that is true is History that is effective in the minds of significant men. The highly refined historical sense is the characteristic of two groups: history-writers and history-makers. Between these two groups also there is an order of rank. History-writing has the task of setting forth for the Age its necessary picture of the Past. This picture, clear and articulate, then becomes effective in the thoughts and actions of the leading history-makers of the Age. This age, like others, has its own appropriate History-picture, and it cannot choose one of a number of pictures. The determining thing in our outlook on History is the Spirit of our Age.

24 Ours is an external, factual, skeptical, historical, Age. It is not moved by great religious or critical feelings. That which to our Cultural forebears was the object of joy, sorrow, passion, necessity, is to us the object of respect and knowledge. The center of gravity of our Age is in Politics. Pure historical thinking is the close relative of political thinking. Historical thinking always seeks to know what was, and not to prove something. Political thinking has the first task of ascertaining the facts and the possibilities, and then of changing them through action. Both are undissociated realism. Neither begins with a program, which it desires to prove. Ours is the first age in Western history in which an absolute submission to facts has triumphed over all other spiritual attitudes. It is the natural corollary of an historical Age, when critical methods have exhausted their possibilities. In the realm of Thought, historical thinking triumphs; in the realm of action, Politics occupies the center of the stage. We follow the facts no matter where they lead, even though we must give up dearly cherished schemes, ideologies, soul-fancies, prejudices. Previous ages in Western history formed their History to fit their souls; we do the same, but our view has no precedent ethical or critical equipment in it. On the contrary — our ethical imperative is derived from our historical outlook and not vice versa. Our outlook on History is no more arbitrary than that of any other age of the West. It is compulsory for us; each man will have this outlook, and his level of significance will depend on the focus in these matters which he can attain and hold. Insofar as a man is an effective representative of this time, he has this particular History-picture and no other. It is not a question of whether he should have it; so to read is completely to misunderstand. He will have it, in his feelings and unconscious valuation of events, even if not in his articulate, verbal, ideas.

25 The Meaning of Facts Whether or not a man’s History-outlook is also intellectually formulated as well as effective in his unconscious doing, thinking, and valuing is merely a function of his general personality. Some men have a greater inner need to think abstractly than others. It must not be supposed that the sense for facts, the historical sense, dispenses with creative thinking. The development of fact-sense is primarily the seeing what is there without ethical or critical preconceptions of what should or should not be there, might or might not. Life-facts are the data of History. A Life-fact is something which has happened. It does not matter to its status as a fact that no one may know of it, that it has vanished without trace. Obviously creative thinking enters into the process of interpreting the data of History, and a moment’s reflection shows also that the process of assessing the data of History is a creative one. Physical facts, like resistance, sourness, redness, are accessible to everyone. Life-facts are not accessible to a man who has a

26 rigid view of History, and who knows that the purpose of all previous happening was to make this age possible, who knows that History has the sole meaning of “Progress.” Remnants of social ethics, preconceived historical notions, utility dogmas — all shut out their victims from inner participation in the life of the 20th and 21st centuries. To this century the new vista now opens of assembling the lost facts in previous ages and previous Cultures. Not tiny incidental data, but the broad outline of necessary organic developments that must have taken place. From our knowledge of past Cultures and their structures, we can kill in missing developments in some from what has survived in others. Most important to us now alive we can fill in what remains to the fulfillment of our own Culture. This can be done in the way that a palaeontologist can reconstruct in broad outlines an entire organism from a single skull-fragment. The process is legitimate and trustworthy in both cases, for Life has patterns in which it actualizes its unique individuals. From an anonymous work of literature remaining, a creative thinker can reconstruct a general picture of the unknown author. Can one not draw quite accurately the soul-portrait of the unknown author of Das Büchlein vom vollkommenen Leben? So also can the “Crusades” period of a Culture be reconstructed if one has knowledge of its “Reformation” stage, or its “Enlightenment” phase. The realm of Thought is interested in the missing stages of past Cultures, and the future of our own, but Action is interested in the Past only as the key to effective performance. Thus the higher importance of history-writing and history-thinking is that they serve effective action. The fact-sense is only operative when dogma, socio-ethical ideas, and critical trappings are put aside. To the fact-sense, it is important that hundreds of millions of people in a certain area

27 believe in the truth of Confucian doctrines. To the fact-sense, it is meaningless whether or not these doctrines are true — even though to religion, Progress-ideologies, and journalism, the truth or falsehood of Confucianism is important. To a 21st century history-writer, the most important thing about the cells, ether-waves, bacillae, electrons, and cosmic rays of our times will be that we believed in them. All of these notions, which the age considers facts, will vanish into the one fact for the 21st century that once upon a time this was a world-picture of a certain kind of Culture-man. So do we look upon the nature-theories of Aristarchus and Democritus in the Classical Culture. And thus facts too have their subjective and objective content. And again, it is the relationship between the man and the phenomenon that determines the form of the fact. Each Culture has in this way its own facts, which arise out of its own problems. What the fact is, depends on what man is experiencing the phenomenon: whether he belongs to a High Culture, to which Culture, to which age thereof, to which nation, to which spiritual stratum, to which social stratum. The facts of the Second World War are one thing in this year 1948, in the brains of the Culture-bearing stratum of Europe, and something totally different in the minds of the newspaper-reading herds. By 2000 the view of the present Culture-bearing stratum will have become also the view of the many, and by that time, more facts will be known to the independent thinkers about the same War than are now known to the few. For one of the characteristics of Life-facts is that distance — particularly temporal distance — shows up their lineaments more clearly. We know more of Imperial history than Tacitus knew, more of Napoleonic history than Napoleon knew, vastly more of the First World War than its creators and

28 participants knew, and Western men in 2050 will know our times in a way that we can never know them. To Brutus his mythological ancestry was a fact, but to us a more important fact is that he believed it. Thus the fact-sense, the prerequisite of the historical outlook of the 20th century, emerges as a form of the poetry of Life. It is the very opposite of the prosaic, drab insistence of the materialistic outlook that facts had to submit to a “progress” ideology in order to be cognized as significant. This view absolutely excluded its victims from any insight into the beauty and power of the facts of history, as well as from any understanding of their significance. The 21st century — whose men will be born into a time when this historical outlook is self-evident — will find it fantastic, if it ever takes notice of it, that in an earlier time men believed that all previous history was merely tending toward them. And yet that was the outlook of the 19th century: whole Cultures, equal by birth and spirituality to our own in every way, lived and died merely that the philistinism of the “progress”-ideologists could chalk up their “achievements” on the wall, meaning a few notions or technical devices.

29 The Demise of the Linear View of History Life is a continuous battle between Young and Old, Old and New, Innovation and Tradition. Ask Galileo, Bruno, Servetus, Copernicus, Gauss. All of them represented the Future, yet all were overcome, in one way or another, during their own lives, by the enthroned Past. Copernicus was afraid to publish during his lifetime, lest he be burned as heretic. Gauss only revealed his liberating discovery of non-Euclidean geometries after his death, for fear of the clamor of the Boeotians. It is therefore not surprising when the materialists persecute, by maligning, by conspiracy of silence, cutting off from access to publicity, or by driving to suicide, as in the case of Haushofer, those who think in 20th century terms and specifically reject the methods and conclusions of 19th century materialism. The 20th century view of History has to make its way over the ruins of the linear scheme which insisted on seeing History as a progression from an “Ancient” through a “Mediaeval” to a “Modern.” I say ruins, for the scheme collapsed decades ago, but they are heavily defended ruins. Hidden in them are the

30 materialists, the posthumous inhabitants of the 19th century, the “Progress” philistines, the social-ethicians, the superannuated devotees of critical philosophy, the ideologists of every description whatever. Common to them all is Rationalism. They assume as a tenet of faith that History is reasonable, that they themselves are reasonable, and that therefore History has done, and will do, what they think it should. The origin of the three-stage view of History is found in St. Joachim of Floris, a Gothic religionist who put forward the three stages as a mystical progression. It was left for the increasing coarseness of intellect devoid of soul to make the progression a materialistic-utilitarian one. For two centuries now, each generation has regarded itself as the peak of all the previous striving of the world. This shows that Materialism is also a Faith, a crude caricature of the precedent religion. It is supplanted now, not because it is wrong — for a Faith can never be injured by refutation — but because the Spirit of the Age is devoid of materialism. The linear scheme was more or less satisfactory to Western man as long as he knew nothing of history outside the Bible, Classic authors, and Western chronicles. Even then, it would not have held up if the philosophy of history had not been a neglected field of endeavor. However, a little over a century ago began a spate of archaeological investigation, including excavations and deciphering of original inscriptions in Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, Crete, China and India. It continues today and now includes also Mexico and Peru. The result of these investigations was to show the historically-minded Western Civilization that it was by no means unique in its historical grandeur, but that it belonged to a group of High Cultures, of similar structure, and of equal elaboration and splendor. The Western Culture is the first to have had both the intense

31 historical impetus as well as the geographic situation to develop a thorough archaeology, which includes now within its purview the whole historical world, just as Western politics at one time embraced the whole surface of the earth. The results of this profound archaeological science broke down the old-fashioned linear scheme of regarding History. It was utterly unable to fit in the new wealth of facts. Since there was some geographic, even though no historical, community between the Egyptian, Babylonian, Classical, and Western Cultures, it had been able to distort them somehow into a picture that could convince those who already believed. But with the opening up of the history of the Cultures that were fulfilled in India, China, Arabia, Mexico, Peru — this view could no longer convince even believers. Furthermore, the materialistic spirit, which had posited the “influence” of preceding Cultures on subsequent ones, meanwhile died out, and the new, psychological outlook on Life recognized the primacy of the soul, the inner purity of the soul, and the superficiality of the process of borrowing of externalia. The new feeling about History was actually coeval with the tremendous outburst of archaeological activity which broke down the old linear scheme. The new outlook became a soul-necessity of Western Civilization at the same time that the history-seeking activity did, even though it was to remain half-articulate until the First World War. This intense outburst of probing of the Past was an expression of a superpersonal feeling that the riddle of History was not touched with the old linear device, that it had to be unlocked, that the totality of facts must be surveyed. As the new facts accumulated, the higher-ranking historians took a wider view, but not until the latter part of the 19th century did any historian or philosopher actually treat Cultures as separate organisms, with parallel

32 existence, independence, and spiritual equality. The idea of “cultural history” itself was a forerunner of this view, and was a prerequisite to the development of the 20th century outlook on History. The rejection of the idea that History was merely the record of reigns and battles, treaties and dates, marked an epoch. The feeling spread that “universal history” was wanted, the combination of the history of politics, law, religion, manners, society, commerce, art, philosophy, warfare, erotic, literature, into one great synthesis. Schiller was one of the first to articulate this general need, although both Voltaire and Winckelmann had written specific histories along these lines. Hegel, on a spiritual basis, and Comte and Buckle, materialistically, developed further the idea of total history, i.e., cultural history. Burckhardt not only produced a quite perfect example of a cultural history in his Italian Renaissance book, but developed a philosophy of history-writing pointing toward the 20th century outlook. Taine, Lamprecht, Breysig, Nietzsche, Meray, all are milestones in the development away from the linear view of history. In their times, only Nietzsche, and to a lesser extent, Burckhardt and Bachofen, understood the 20th century idea of the unity of a Culture. But two generations later the idea of the unity of a High Culture is general in the highest spiritual stratum of Europe, and has become a prerequisite to both historical and political thinking. What was this linear view of History? It was either a mere arbitrary breaking-up of historical materials for handling and reference, without any claim to philosophical significance, or else it was an attempt at a philosophy of history. Its pretensions to the latter could not very well hold up in view of the fact that for generations the starting-point of the “Modern” age has been shifted around from century to century with complete freedom. Each writer has formulated the significance and dates of the three stages differently and the various formulations exclude

33 one another. But if they are not the same view, why the same terminology? Thus it was no philosophy of history, but a mere set of three names which were retained because of a sort of magic which was supposed to inhere in them. Nor was it a satisfactory method of breaking up the historical facts for reference purposes, since it left no place for China and India, and since it treated the Babylonian and Egyptian, in every way the historical equals of the Classical and our own, as though they were mere episodes, together constituting a prelude to the Classical. For this grotesque History-outlook, a millennium in Egypt was a footnote, while ten years in our own century were a volume. II The basis of the linear view was Cultural egocentricity, or in other words the unconscious assumption that the Western Culture was the focus of the whole meaning of all human history, that previous Cultures had importance only insofar as they “contributed” something to us, but that in themselves they had no importance whatever. This is why the Cultures which lived in areas remote from Western Europe are hardly even mentioned. These famous “contributions” — what was meant was a few technical devices from the Egyptian and Babylonian Cultures, and the Cultural remains generally of the Classical. The Arabian, again, was almost totally ignored, for geographic reasons. And yet Western architecture, religion, philosophy, science, music, lyric, manners, erotic, politics, finance, economics all are totally independent of the corresponding Classical forms. It is the archaeological cast of the Western soul, its intensely historical nature, that prompt it to reverence what mere geography might indicate is a spiritual ancestor. And yet — who believes, or ever did actually believe, that the

34 Rome of Hildebrand, of Alexander VI, of Charles V, or of Mussolini, had any continuity whatever with the Rome of Flaminius, Sulla, Caesar? This whole Classicistic yearning of the West, with its two high points in the Italian Renaissance and above all, in Winckelmann’s movement, was actually nothing but a literary-Romantic pose. If we had known less of Rome and more of Mecca, Napoleon’s title might have been Caliph instead of First Consul, but nothing would have inwardly altered. The endowing of words and names with magic significance is quite necessary and legitimate in religion, philosophy, science, and criticism, but is out of place in an outlook on History. Even in the Italian Renaissance, Francesco Pico wrote against the mania for the Classical: “Who will be afraid to confront Plato with Augustine, or Aristotle with Thomas, Albert, and Scotus?” Savonarola’s movement also had cultural, as well as religious, significance: into the bonfires went the Classical works. The whole Classicist tendency of the Italian Renaissance has been too heavily drawn: it was literary, academic, the possession of a few small circles, and those not the leading ones in thought or action. And yet this movement has been put forward as the “link” between two Cultures that have nothing in common in order to create a picture of History as a straight line instead of as the spiritually parallel, pure, independent, development of High Cultures. To the religious outlook, with its branches, philosophy and criticism, “Progress-philistinism,” and social ethics, facts figure only as proof, and lack any other interest. To the historical outlook, facts are the material sought after, and even doctrines, dogmas, and truths, are treated as simply facts. Previous Western ages were thus satisfied by the linear scheme, despite its

35 complete independence of the facts of history. To the 20th century, however, with its center of gravity in politics, History is not a mere instrument of proving or illustrating any dogma, or socio-ethical “Progress” theory, but the source of our effective world-outlook. And so, in implicit obedience to the Spirit of the Age, the leading minds of the 20th century reject the old-fashioned, anti-factual, linear theory of History. In its place the Spirit of the Age has shown the actual structure of human history, the history of eight High Cultures, each an organism with its own individuality and destiny. The older type of philosophy of history forced the facts to prove some religious, ethical, or critical theory; the 20th century outlook takes its philosophy of history from the facts. The 20th century outlook is none the less subjective because it starts from facts; it is merely obeying the inner imperative of its own historical soul in seeing its History-picture thus. Our view is none the less peculiarly ours because it gives priority to facts; other types of men, outside the Western Culture, or beneath it, will never be able to understand it, any more than they can understand higher Western mathematics, Western technics, physics, or chemistry, Gothic architecture or the art of the fugue. This picture of History, absolutely compulsory as it is for the leading men of thought of action in the Western Civilization, is no compulsion for the masses that throng in the streets of the Western capitals. Historical relativity is, like physical relativity, the possession of a few leading minds. History is not experienced, nor made, in the streets, but on the heights. The number of men in the Western Civilization who were aware of the actual meaning of the Second World War is countable in thousands. Western philosophy, from the days of Anselm, has always been esoteric. No less so is the 20th century

36 outlook, and correspondingly small is the number of those for whom it is a soul-necessity. But the number for whom the decisions of these few will be decisive is not numbered in hundreds, but in hundreds of millions. To the 20th century, the regarding of all previous human happening as merely introductory to, and preparatory to our own Western history, is simply immense naïvete. Evolutions that required just as long as our millennium of Western history are contracted into mere casual events; the men in these other Cultures are treated as though they were children, dimly trying to attain to one or another of our specifically Western ideas. But in each of these previous Cultures, the stage was reached and passed that we attained to in the 19th and 20th centuries: free science, social ethics, democracy, materialism, atheism, rationalism, class war, money, nationalism, annihilation-wars. Highly artificial living conditions, megalopolitan sophistication, social disintegration, divorce, degeneration of the old arts to mere formlessness — they exhibited all these familiar symptoms. The vast amount of historical knowledge of which the 20th century must take account — knowledge unearthed by the historical age which succeeded to the age of Criticism — can tolerate no arbitrary forcing of the facts of history into a preconceived scheme with three magical stages, which must remain three even though no one can agree where one begins and the other leaves off, and of which the third stage has been prolonged indefinitely since Professor Horn of Leyden announced in 1667 his discovery of “the Middle Ages.” The first formulation of the 20th century outlook on History only came with the First World War. Previously, only Breysig had definitely broken with the linear scheme, but his earlier work covered only a part of human history. It was left to

37 Spengler, the philosopher of the age, to set forth the full outline of the structure of History. He himself was the first to recognize the superpersonal nature of his work, when he said that an historically essential idea is only in a limited sense the property of him to whose lot it falls to parent it. It was for him to articulate that at which everyone was groping. The view of others was limited by one or another specialist horizon, ant their projects were consequently incomplete, one-sided, top-heavy. Like all products of genius, Spengler’s work seems perfectly obvious to those who come afterwards, and again, it was directed to those to come and not to contemporaries. Genius is always directed toward the Future; this is in its nature, and this is the explanation of the usual fate of all works of genius, political and economic, as well as artistic and philosophical, that they are understood in their grandeur and simplicity only by the after-world of their creators.

38 The Structure of History One of the unconscious assumptions of the linear scheme was the idea of the singularity of civilization. The concept “civilization” was used as though all highly symbolic Life, wherever and whenever it appeared, was really a manifestation of the same thing — “civilization.” “Civilization” outside of the West was imperfect, striving to be Western, stammering and fumbling. This “civilization” was something that previous ages had stupidly allowed to slip away, but somehow it was always found again, hidden in a book somewhere, and “passed on” to the Future. Again this was Rationalism: it assumed that men made their own history, and whatever happened was traceable to human excellence or to human mistakes. But, to the pinnacle of historical insight and self-conscious grand historical creativeness of deeds that is the 20th century, History is the record of the lives of eight High Cultures, each an organism, impressed with the principle of individuality, each thus a member of a Life-form. The type High Culture is a Life-form

39 at the peak of the organic hierarchy of which plants, animals, and man are the lower members. Each of the Cultures that we have seen is a member of this higher genus, an individual. Belonging as they do to one genus, they have common characteristics in their general habitue, their life-necessities, their technic of self-expression, their relation to landscape and population-streams, and their life span. The differences among the Cultures are in their souls, their individualities, and thus, despite their similar structure, their creations are in the highest degree dissimilar. In the organic hierarchy, the principle of individuality is manifested at an increasing level of concentration from plants, through animals, to man. Cultures are even more highly individual than men, and their creations are correspondingly less capable of any inward assimilation by other Cultures. With the passing of the Age of Materialism, the West knows once more that the development of an organism is the unfolding of a soul. The matter is the mere envelope, the vehicle of the expression of the spirit. It is this ancient and universal wisdom that is the primary source of the liberation of our History-outlook from the darkness and oppressiveness of Mechanism. The events of a human life are the expressions of the soul of that human at its successive stages of unfolding. The identical outward occurrence is a different experience for each human being: an experience is a relationship between a soul and an outer event. Thus no two persons can have the same experience, because the identical event is quite different to each different soul. Similarly the reactions of each Culture-soul to externals of landscape, population-streams, and events and movements outside the Culture-area, are individual to each Culture. The religious experiences of each Culture are unique: each Culture has its own non-transferable way of experiencing and depicting the

40 Godhead, and this religious style continues right through the life span of the Culture, and determines completely the philosophy, science, and also the anti-religious phenomena of the Culture. Each Culture has its own kind of atheism, as unique as its religion. The philosophy and science of each Culture never become independent of the religious style of the Culture; even Materialism is only a profane caricature of the basic religious feeling of the Culture. The choice of art-forms, and the content of the art-forms, are individual to each Culture. Thus the Western is the first to invent oil-painting, and the first to give primacy to music. The number-feeling of the Culture develops in each its own mathematics, which describes its own number-world, which again is inwardly non-transferable, even though external developments may be partially taken over, and then inwardly transformed by other Cultures. The State-idea is likewise individual, as are the Nation-idea, and the style of the final Imperium, the last political creation of the Culture. Each Culture has its own style in technics — weak and crude in the Classical and Mexican-Peruvian, colossal and earth-shaking in our own — its own war-style, its own relation to economics, its own history-style, or organic tempo. Each Culture has a different basic Morale, which influences its social structure, feelings, and manners, its intensity of inner imperative, and thus the ethical style of its great men. This basic morale determines the style of public life during the last great phase of the life of the Culture the Civilization. Not only are the Cultures differentiated from one another by their highly developed representation of the principle of individuality, but each age of each Culture has its own stamp, which sets it off from its preceding age, and from the succeeding. These differences loom larger to the humans within a Culture

41 than the difference between one Culture and another. This is the optical illusion of greater size produced by nearness. To us the difference between 1850 and 1950 seems vast — to the history of 2150 it will be much less so. We have the feeling before we study history that 1300 and 1400 were spiritually much the same, but in fact, in that century there were spiritual developments as far-reaching as those between 1850 and 1950. Here again, the linear scheme distorted History utterly: it said “Ancient” and thought that thereby it was describing one thing, one general spirituality. But Egypt and Babylonia both had their own corresponding phenomena to our Crusades, Gothic religion, Holy Roman Empire, Papacy, Feudalism, Scholasticism, Reformation, Absolute State, Enlightenment, Democracy, Materialism, Class War, Nationalism, and annihilation wars. So did the others — the Chinese, Indian, Arabian, Classical, and Mexican. The extent of information available is quite different with regard to the various Cultures, but enough remains to show the structure of History. Between one age of Egyptian history and the next, there was as much difference as between 1700, the period of our Spanish Succession Wars, and 1800, our Napoleonic Wars. This illusion about distance finds an analogy in the spatial world; a distant mountain range looks smooth; nearer, it is rocky. The idea that “civilization” was one certain thing, rather than an organic life-phase of a Culture, was a part of the “Progress” ideology. This profane religion, its own peculiar mixture of Reason and Faith, satisfied a certain inner demand of the 19th century. Further research will probably discover it in other Cultures. It seems to be an organic necessity of Rationalism to feel that “things are getting better all the time.” Thus “progress” was a continuous moral improvement of “humanity,” a movement toward more and better “civilization.” The ideology

42 was formulated slightly differently by each materialist, but it was not allowed to dispute that “Progress” occurred. To do so marked one as a “pessimist.” The ideal toward which there was continual “progress” was necessarily unattainable, for if it could be attained, “progress” would cease, and this was unthinkable. Such a picture fitted the Age of Criticism, but in an historical Age this picture becomes just one more object of interest, as being the expression of one certain life-stage of a certain Culture. It is on a par with the world-picture of imminent catastrophe of mid-14th century, the witch obsession of the 16th century, the Reason-worship of the 18th century. All these outlooks possess now only historical significance. What interests us is that once they were believed. But as for trying to force the old-fashioned “progress” ideology on the 20th century, such an attempt is ludicrous; whoever would try stamps himself as an anachronistic mediocrity. II The word history has been employed to cover all human events, those manifesting the development of a Culture, and those outside of any Culture. But the two classes of events have nothing in common. Man as a species is one Life-form, Culture-man is another. The word history therefore designates separate things in the two cases. In what is man as a species distinct from other Life-forms, such as plants and animals? Simply in his possession of a human soul. This soul shapes for man a different world from the world of other forms of life. Man’s world is a world of symbols. Things that for animals contain no meaning, and no mystery, have for man a symbolic significance. Outside of a High

43 Culture, this symbolizing-necessity shows itself in the formation of primitive culture. Such cultures have an animistic religion, an ethic of tabu and totem, and social-political forms on the same level. Such cultures are not a unity, i.e., no single prime symbol is actualized in all the forms of the culture. These cultures are mere sums, collections of motives and tendencies. Nowhere is primitive man without some primitive culture of this type. Man as a pure animal does not exist. All animals have a purely economic-reproductive existence: their whole individual lives consist in the process of nourishing and reproducing themselves, their lives have no spiritual superstructure above this plane. Nevertheless, man’s life in primitivity, and in an area where a High Culture is fulfilling itself, are two incommensurable things. The difference is so vast as to constitute one of kind, and not of mere degree. Vis-à-vis the history of Culture-man, primitive man seems merely zoological. The history that Stanley found in progress on his African explorations was of the one kind, and Stanley himself represented the other kind. Similarly zoological is the history of the lake-dwellers in Switzerland, the Chinese today, the Arabs, Bushmen, Indians, Amerindians, Lapps, Mongols, and the countless other tribes, races, and peoples outside our Western Civilization. The animal is solely concerned with economics, primitive man sees hidden meanings in the world — but Culture-man regards his high symbols as the content of Life. A High Culture reshapes entirely the economic practice of the populations upon whom it sets its grip; it reduces economics to the bottom of the pyramid of life. To a High Culture, economics has the same significance that the function of eating has to an individual. Above economics are all the manifestations of the High Culture’s life: architecture, religion, philosophy, art, science,

44 technics, education, politics, erotic, city-building, imperialism, society. The significance an individual has is the reflex of his personal connection with the symbols of the Culture. This valuation itself is produced by the Culture to an anti-cultural outlook such as the curious “materialistic interpretation of history,” any proletaire is worth more than Calderon, for Calderon was not a manual laborer, and therefore accomplished nothing in a world whose entire significance is economic. The difference between the history of man as a species and the history of man in the service of High Culture is that the first is devoid of grand meaning, and that only the second is the vessel of high significance. In high history, men risk all and die for an Idea; in primitivity there are no superpersonal ideas of this force, but only personal strivings, crude lust for booty or formless power. Consequently it would be an error to regard the difference as merely quantitative. The example of Genghis Khan shows this: the events he let loose were considerable in size, but in the cultural sense they have no significance whatever. There was no Idea in this sweeping descent of the followers of an adventurer. His conquests were fatal to hundreds of thousands, the empire he erected lasted generations beyond him, but it was simply there — it stood for nothing, represented nothing beyond itself. Napoleon’s empire on the other hand, brief though it was, was laden with symbolic meaning that is still at work in the minds of Western men, and that is, as we shall see, pregnant with the Future of the West. High Cultures create the greatest wars, but their significance is not merely that they open rivers of blood, but that these men fall in a struggle of ideas. After a High Culture has fulfilled itself, the populations in its former area return to the condition of primitivity, as the examples of India, China, Islam, and Egypt tell us. The world-cities

45 empty themselves, the outer barbarians plunder them bare, and the men that are left are once more clans, tribes, nomads. When outer events do not destroy the remains utterly, the caste system of the last stage remains indefinitely, as in India and China, but it is the mere skeletal remains of the former Culture, which, like everything living, passes away, never to return. The memory of the Culture remains, but the attitude of the remaining populations toward its products is once more entirely primitive, unchanging, purely personal. The abandoned world-cities return once more to the landscapes which they once dominated. World-cities that were once as proud as Berlin, London, and New York disappeared under jungle vegetation or the sands of the plain. This was the fate of Luxor, Thebes, Babylon, Pataliputra, Samarra, Uxmal, Tezcuco, Tenochtitlan. In the latter cases, even the names of the great cities have perished, and we call them after nearby villages. But it is an unimportant detail whether the city lies dead upon the surface, inhabited by a few clans who farm in the open spaces, fight in the streets, and shelter in the abandoned structures, or whether the sands shift over the crumbling remains.

46 Pessimism It was a remarkably curious phenomenon that when the organically necessary historical outlook on History, replacing the religious and critical-philosophical outlooks of previous Western ages, appeared early in the 20th century, it was greeted by the day-before-yesterday thinkers with a cry of “Pessimism.” By this word it was apparently thought possible to conjure away the spirit of the coming age, and summon to new life the dead spirit of an age that had passed away. To abstract inorganic thought this feat did not seem considerable, since it regarded History as the field wherein one could do whatever he wanted to make the Past dance to his own tune. The word pessimism was a polemical word — it described an attitude of general despair, which was supposed to color opinions and assessments of facts. Any person who seriously used this word showed thereby that he was willing to treat a world-historical philosophy in an electioneering fashion. Obviously an asserted fact should be examined entirely independently of the attitude of him asserting it. The whole pessimism cry is thus an ad hominem argument, and worthless. Facts are not pessimistic

47 or optimistic, sane or insane — an optimist may assert a fact, a madman may, a pessimist may. Describing the man who uttered the fact still leaves entirely open the correctness or incorrectness of the fact. Its purely ad hominem nature was the first weakness in the “Pessimism” view of the 20th century outlook on History. Pessimism only describes an attitude, and not facts, and hence is entirely subjective. The attitude toward life that Nietzsche continually belabored as “Pessimism” in its turn described Nietzsche as a pessimist, and both were undoubtedly correct. If someone else thinks my plans are doomed, I consider him a pessimist, from my standpoint. Similarly, if I think his aspirations will come to naught, he thinks me a pessimist. We are both correct. The “Progress” ideologists, smug in their secure mental armor, insulated from all contact with Reality, naturally felt it to be insulting in the extreme when it was suggested that their particular Faith also had a life span, was also, like all previous world-pictures, merely a description of a particular soul of a certain age, and thus was destined to pass away. To say that the “Progress” religion would come to an end with the Age whose inner demands it satisfied was to deny the truth of this religion, since it claimed to be a universal description of all human history. What was worse was that the 20th century outlook on History was formulated in such a strict factual way as to be compelling to the 20th century mind. This meant that catchwords had to be employed against it, since no other form of disputation would avail. With the single word “Pessimism;” it was hoped to strangle the 20th century outlook on History. It would be mistaken to put this down to the malice of the “Progress” religionists. No age submits quietly to the Spirit of the coming age. The witchcraft religionists certainly did not agree with the first materialists who denied the very existence of witches. The

48 conflict between the Established and the Becoming goes on continually, and the Becoming always prevails. It does so, not because it is true, and the Established was false, but because both were the lifestage of an organism, a Culture. Truth and falsehood have as little to do with this process as they do with the transformation of the boy into a youth, the youth into a man, the man into a dotard. The grandson is no more true than the grandfather, yet he will prevail, because of the organic advantage he has. Similarly does the historical attitude of the 20th century supplant the 19th century religion of Materialism. Materialism, Rationalism, “Progress,” are all worn out, but the historical attitude of the 20th century is full of vigor and promise, eagerness to set itself to its great factual tasks, to create its great deeds. This organic necessity alone gives it its compelling quality. No one in this gigantic age when nations are world powers in one decade, and colonies in the next, can conscientiously maintain even before himself any shallow and infantile pretense that underneath all these cataclysms there is the meaning of a steady “moral improvement” of “humanity.” Some men have been rational for short periods — this is the sum total of the appearance of Reason in History. But such men have never made History, for it is irrational. The pretense of Reason being the meaning of History was itself irrational, since it was a product of History. When the worship of Reason was instituted in Revolutionary France as a religion — a Faith — a fille de joie was crowned as the Goddess of Reason. Even Rationalism bears the stamp of Life — it is irrational. The meaning of the word pessimism must be further laid bare. As we have seen, the word is subjective, and thus describes everybody, if he has a conviction that something is doomed. Suppose I say — Imperial Rome inwardly decayed, and within a

49 few centuries the Roman idea was completely dead. Is this pessimism? My grandfather is dead — am I a pessimist to say so? Someday I shall die — pessimism? Everything living must die — pessimism? To Life belongs Death — pessimism? Is there any example of an individual which has moved completely outside the organic sequence of that Life-form to which he belongs, and remained constantly at one life-stage for such long time-periods as to justify the conclusion that it was a case of Life without Death? An example would be a man who lived for — not 100 years, for we all believe such a man will eventually die — but two or three hundred years, and continually at one life stage, say the biological age of 65 years. We know no such man, no such life-form. The criers of “pessimism” will call this pessimism, no doubt. We should keep up the pretense before ourselves all of our individual lives that we shall not die, for to admit mortality is pessimism. History discloses seven precedent High Cultures to us. Their gestation-periods were morphologically identical, as were their birth-pangs, their first life-activities, their growth, their mature stages, their great Civilization-crises, their final life-forms, the gradual relaxing, the coming to each of a time when one had to say, looking at the landscape where the mighty being had fulfilled itself, that it was no longer, that it had died. This realization gives extreme pain to the “Pessimism” wailers, and I know of no remedy for their pain. These seven Cultures are dead — it would have been much more remarkable if they had gone on forever. II But our Civilization is itself a stage of a High Culture, the Culture of the West. Its millennium of history shows that it is an individual organism belonging to the Life-form High Culture.

50 Can fact-thinkers pretend that it belongs to the Life-form but has no Life-span? The question can now be formulated: exactly how is it “Pessimism” to say that since seven High Cultures fulfilled themselves that an eighth will also? If this is “Pessimism,” then anyone admitting his own mortality is inevitably a “Pessimist.” The alternative to pessimism thus becomes idiocy. However pessimism is an attitude, and if someone says that to admit the fact that Life is fulfilled in Death is pessimism, he shows something about himself. He shows his own cowardly fear of death, his entire lack of heroism, of respect for the mysteries of Being and Becoming, his shallow materialism. One must never forget that these same people are the ones who write and read, in their book and magazine press, a literature on indefinitely prolonging the life-span of the human species. Again, this shows something about them. How they delight in juggling insurance statistics in such a way as to make them think they are living longer! This is their valuation of life: the longest life is the best. To this mentality, a short and heroic life is sad, not inspiring. Heroism generally is thus merely foolish, since indefinitely prolonged life is the aim of “Progress.” In the Gothic religious times, the Western form of the idea of immortality of the soul was formed and developed. With the age of Materialism, this became caricatured into the immortality of the body. The doctor of medicine became the priest of the new religion, and a whole literature glorified him as the ultimate human type, since he was saving life. And yet, shocking though it is to these people, Death continues to accompany Life. 20th century wars take more lives than 19th century wars. The generations continue their procession to the grave, and even the most cowardly materialist, who can never admit that anything living will ever die, goes the way of the materialists in the other eight Cultures.

51 To people who live in a nameless terror of personal death, naturally the idea of the passing away of a superpersonal soul is also horrible and frightening. Materialists have never been respecters of facts — whatever was not measurable by their ruler did not exist. Historical facts are per se uninteresting to a rationalist outlook, which begins with a critical principle, and not with facts, and it was hardly to be expected that a view of history resting on five millennia of history rather than on a simple philosophical platitude would take them along with it. It is curious that the Pessimism-wailers, who denied the Culture would ever die, also denied the organic nature of a Culture. In other words, they also denied it lives. Their materialism compelled them to the last, their cowardice to the first. Most important about all their attitudes was that they did not understand the central idea of the 20th century outlook. The hundreds of volumes that they wrote against it each one echoing the magic word “Pessimism” — show that distressingly clearly. On every page is a fundamental misunderstanding of the great thesis. By their lack of comprehension, they provided another proof of the accuracy of the outlook, for the view of one age only reflects the soul of that age, and the 20th century outlook was definitely not adapted to their 19th century outlook. One great historical fact could have given them consolation: the passing of this Culture, which was not alive, and also would never die, according to them, would mean little to them in particular. In the first place, a Culture is not born, nor does it die in a few years; these processes are measured in generations and centuries. Thus no man could ever see a Culture appear or disappear, and no materialist would ever be obliged to undergo the painful experience of watching it die. More important, the lives of the ordinary people, on the everyday plane of life, are little affected by the presence of the Culture or the Civilization, during and after its passing, the life of the ordinary people, in

52 its stark fundamentals, is simply life. The great numbers vanish, since they were only there to perform the last great life-tasks of the Civilization; the artificial living-conditions go, the great wars cease, the great demands, the great deeds. Pacifism — organic pacifism, not ideological pacifism, which stirs up wars — is the end-condition of a Culture. Now then, the materialists are exclusively among the ordinary people — what concern have they with great things like heroism, great wars, and imperialism? Therefore the end of a Culture should beckon to them. Actually, however, their whole terror rested on an illusion. It would be as foolish for someone now to worry about the events of 2300 A.D. as it would have been for Frederick the Great to worry about the conditions of 1900. He could not have imagined those exact conditions, hence he could not have planned for them, hence it would have been foolish for him to dread them. They were to be the concern of other people. The day’s demands, as Goethe said, constitute one’s immediate duty. We living in Europe today have a certain task imposed upon us by the situation, the times, and our own inner imperative. The most we can do about forming the remote Future is to do our utmost in giving to this age the strong and manly form it demands. The generation after the next will have its task also, and the only way we can make ourselves effective in their age will be so to conduct ourselves now that our deeds and example will live after us. To a materialist, this is pessimism. III There are many intellectuals who stop at the title of leading works of an historical age: these gathered the basis for their charge of pessimism against the 20th century world-outlook

53 from the title of the first book fully to outline it: The Decline of the West. Decline had a definitely pessimistic sound to these gentlemen; they needed no more. In his essay Pessimism? (1921), Spengler mentioned that some people had confused the sinking of a Culture with the sinking of a steamship, whereas, as applied to a Culture, the idea of a catastrophe was not contained in the word. He explains further that this title was decided upon in 1911, when, in his words, “the shallow optimism of the Darwinistic age lay over the West-European-American world.” He prepared the book, in which he set forth the thesis of an age of annihilation-wars for the immediate future, for the coming age, and chose the title to contradict the prevailing optimism. In 1921, he wrote, he would choose a title that would contradict the equally shallow pessimism then prevailing. If pessimism be defined as seeing nothing more to be done, it does not touch a philosophy which sets forth task after task remaining to the Western Civilization. Apart from the political and economic, to which this work is devoted, Western physics, chemistry and technics all have their peaks before them, as have also archaeology and historical philosophy. The formulation of a legal system freed from philology and conceptualizing is also a need. National economy needs to be approached and organized thoroughly in the 20th century spirit, and above all, an education must be created, in the grand sense of consciously training the coming generations, in the full light of the historic necessity of our Future, for the great life-tasks of the Civilization. The cry of “Pessimism” is dying down — the 20th century outlook on History surveys from its historical peak and to its own unique, vast, historical horizons, the life-courses of eight High Cultures accomplished, and even looks boldly and confidently

54 into its own Culture’s future, yet to be accomplished. Readers in 1950 have forgotten, and readers in 2050 will possibly have no way of finding out, that before the 20th century outlook on History appeared, unrealized history was regarded as a blank tablet on which man might write whatever he wished. This was of course the instinctive attitude of no single man of action — they have to know better in order to accomplish the veriest trifle, but even they had to maintain the pretense that the Future was carte blanche. No one thinks in this fashion during the second half of the 20th century; the bleating of the rationalists and the whimpering of the materialists are growing fainter. Even they are now talking about History, instead of about their old platitudes. Even their press now fits out its herd of readers with a history-outlook. History begins in 1870, and it ends after the next war; each war is portrayed as the last. This History-picture did service for more than a generation, and its very existence in materialistic journalism is a sign of the increasingly historical attitude of the age. After the First World War, a “League of Nations” was established to bring about “World Peace,” and there was a considerable number of persons in the Western Civilization who took it seriously. Within the short space of one generation, however, a second “League” was founded after a Second World War, but this time, owing to the inner victory in the West of the 20th century world-outlook which had occurred meanwhile, almost no one looked upon the “League” as anything other than a localization of diplomatic war-preparations between the two remaining powers. We have come a long way from the old “Progress” days. The tables are turned on the wailers of “Pessimism.” Actually they are merely the representatives of the Spirit of an Age that has gone forever. Thus they are anachronistic in this Age, and to the extent that they try to intervene in its Life, they must

55 fight against its every expression-tendency. They can only negate the Future with their hopeless attempt to revive the Past. Does not this make them pessimists? The definitive word can now be said about pessimism, and about optimism, for the two are inseparable as concepts. If pessimism is despair, optimism is cowardice and stupidity. Is there any need to choose between them? They are twin soul-diseases. Between them lies realism, which wants to know what is, what must be done, how it can be done. Realism is historical thinking, and it is also political thinking. Realism does not approach the world with a preconceived principle to which things ought to submit — it is this prime stupidity which begets both pessimism and optimism. If it looks as though things will not fit, so to declare is pessimism. Optimism continues to pretend that they do, despite the entire course of History, to the contrary. Of the two diseases, optimism is more dangerous to the soul, for it is more blind. Pessimism, by not being afraid to affirm the unpleasing, is at least capable of seeing, and may yield to a flaring-up of healthy instincts. Every captain must prepare for both victory and defeat, and tactically, the latter part of his plan is more important, and no captain would refrain from taking measures to apply in defeat because someone said to him that this was pessimism. Let us go further — a hundred odd Americans were surrounded in 1836 in the Alamo by Mexican armies numbering thousands. Was it pessimistic for them to realize that their position was hopeless? But there happened something which the materialists — the real pessimists — can never understand. The members of the tiny garrison did not allow the obvious hopelessness of the situation to affect their personal conduct — every man chose to fight on rather than surrender. They thought rather of what was left to do than of the ultimate annihilation. This was also the attitude of the Kamikaze pilots who in the

56 Second World War drove their explosive-laden airplanes on to enemy ships of war. Not only is this attitude entirely outside any stupid optimism-pessimism scheme, but it is the essence of heroism itself. Fear of death does not prevent the hero from doing what has to be done. The 20th century has this heroic attitude once more, and it thinks of its task, and not of the ultimate end of all Life in Death. Least of all does it fear death so much, both individual death and the fulfillment of the Civilization within which we must actualize our possibilities, that it attempts to deny Death in any way. It wants to live Life, not cringe before Death. Optimism and pessimism are for cowards, weaklings, fools, and stupid persons, incapable of appreciating the mystery, power, and beauty of Life. They shrink from sternness and renunciation, and escape from the brutality of facts into dreams of immortality of the body, and indefinite perpetuation of the world-outlook of the 19th century. As I write — 1948 — these cowardly pessimists lord it over the submerged Western Civilization, propped up by extra-European forces. They pretend that all is well, now that Europe is the spoils for powers from without, sunk to the level of India and China . The 20th century spirit, however, which they hate because it is young and full of Life, intends to sweep them one day soon into History’s dust-bin, whither they were long since consigned. Theirs is the attitude — Do nothing. And yet they have the temerity to brand the representatives of the 20th century spirit with the positive attitude of accomplishment as “Pessimists.” The materialists and Liberals talk of “return” to better conditions — always return. The new spirit commands: Forward to our greatest Age of all. This age and its spirit would not shrink from entering upon its task of building the Empire of the West even if it were told that the outer forces are too strong, that they will never succeed.

57 It prefers to die on its feet rather than live on its knees, like the materialists and other cowards who now make themselves serviceable to the outsiders in their great task of looting and destroying the Western Civilization. The great ethical imperative of this age is individual truth-to-self, both for the Civilization and its leading persons. To this imperative, an unfavorable situation could never bring about an adaptation of one’s self to the demands of the outsider, merely in order to live in slavish peace. One asserts himself, determined on personal victory, against whatever odds exist. The promise of success is with the man who is determined to die proudly if it is no longer possible to live proudly.

58 The Civilization-Crisis All the cultures arrived at the point in their development when their possibilities for culture — in the narrower sense — were fulfilled. The Life-directions of religion, philosophy, and the arts of form, were fully expressed and formed definitively. The Counter-Reformation was the period of the definitive shaping of Western religious formative potentialities, and thence-forward religion was on the defensive against profane tendencies, which gradually increased and finally, with the turn of the 19th century, gained the upper hand. Kant is the high point of Western possibilities in inorganic philosophy, as was his contemporary Goethe for organic philosophy. Mozart is the high point of music, the art that the Western Culture chose as its most perfect for its own soul. Naturally the Culture had always had both an inner and outer life; politics and war had always continued, since they are inseparable from the life of Culture-man. But in the first centuries of the Culture — say until 1400 — Religion had dominated the total Cultural life. Gothic architecture, Gothic sculpture,

59 glass-painting and fresco — all these arts had served religious expression, and these centuries may be called the Age of Religion. This period yielded to new tendencies, less inward, reflected also in the greater development of trade and economic production. The new tendencies are more urban; they contain more adaptation to the external world, but they are still primarily inward. The arts pass into the custody of “Great Masters,” and become emancipated from religion. The maturity of the Culture shows itself in its development at this time of its greatest and most refined art. In the West, this was music; in the Classical, it was sculpture. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation are both steps away from the Age of Religion. Philosophy becomes independent of theology, and natural science challenges dogmas of Faith. The basic attitude toward the world is still sacred, but the illuminated foreground widens constantly. This period is the Baroque in our Culture, lasting from 1500 to 1800, the Ionic in the Classical. During these centuries, the politics reflected the strict formative stage of the Culture. The struggle for political power was strictly within the bounds imposed by the Culture-soul. Armies were small, professional; war was the possession of the nobility; peace treaties were arrived at by negotiation and compromise; honor was present at every decision of politics or war. The later Baroque produced the Age of “Enlightenment.” Reason was now felt as all-powerful, and to challenge its almightiness became as unthinkable as it would have been to challenge God in Gothic times. The English philosophers from Locke onward, and the French Encyclopedists who adopted their ideas, were the custodians of the spirit of this age. By 1800, the externalizing tendency has prevailed completely over the old inwardness of the strict Culture. “Nature” and

60 “Reason” are the new gods; the outer world is regarded as primary. From having examined his own soul, and having expressed its formative possibilities to the limit in the inner world of religion, philosophy, and art, Culture-man now finds his imperative directed to subjecting the outer world to himself. The great symbol of this transition in our Culture is Napoleon, in the Classical, Alexander. They represented the victory of Civilization over Culture. Civilization is in one way a denial of the Culture, in another way it is the sequel. It is organically necessary, and all the Cultures went through this stage. This present work is concerned throughout with the problems of Civilization in general, and of our immediate problem for the period 1950-2000 in particular. Therefore it is not necessary to do more than present in this place a bare outline of the significance to the organism of the Civilization-phase. With the triumph of Reason comes an immense liberating effect on the Culture-populations. The feelings that were formerly expressed only in strict forms, whether in art, war, cabinet-politics, or philosophy, are now given free rein, increasingly independent of Culture-bounds. Rousseau for instance, advocated the doing away with all Culture, and the descent of Culture-man to the purely animal plane of economics and reproduction. Art develops increasingly away from strict form, from Beethoven to our day. The ideal of the Beautiful yields finally to the ideal of the Ugly. Philosophy becomes pure social-ethics, when it is not a coarse and crude metaphysics of materialism. Economics, formerly merely the foundation of the great structure, now becomes the focus of immense energy. It too succumbs to Reason, and in this field, Reason formulates the quantitative measure of value, Money. Reason applied to politics produced Democracy; applied to

61 war, it produced the mass army to replace the professional one, and the dictate instead of the treaty. The authority and dignity of the Absolute State are felt as tyranny by the new life-tendencies, and in heavy battles, the forces of Money, Economics, and Democracy overcome the State. For its responsible, public, leadership, is substituted the irresponsible, private, rule of anonymous groups, classes, and individuals, whose interests the parliaments serve. The psychology of monarchs is replaced by the psychology of crowds and mobs, the new base for power of the man of ambition. Production, technics, trade, public power, and — above all — population-numbers increase fantastically. These numbers are produced by the enormous final life-task of the Culture, namely the subjection of its known world to its domination. In an area where formerly there were 80 millions there are now 260 millions. The great common denominator of the Civilization ideas is mobilization. The masses of the Culture-populations, and the masses whom they conquer, the earth itself, and the power of intellectual ideals — all are mobilized. II From the standpoint of the whole life of the organism this stage is a crisis, for the whole idea of the Culture itself is attacked, and the custodians of the Culture must wage a battle of more than two centuries against inner attacks, in class war. Down beneath the Culture, the idea awakens in the minds of intellectuals that this Culture is a thing that must be done away with, that man is an animal and is corrupted by development of his soul. Philosophies appear, denying the existence of anything but matter; life is defined as a physico-chemical process; its

62 twin-urges are economic and reproductive; anything above this level is sinful. Both from the economic leaders and from the class-warriors comes the doctrine that all life is nothing but economics. From self-styled “psychologists” comes the doctrine that life is nothing but reproduction. But the strength of the organism, even in crisis, is too great for a few intellectuals and their mobs to destroy it, and it goes its way. In the Western Civilization, the expansive tendency reached the point where by 1900, 18/20ths of the surface of the earth was controlled politically from Western capitals. And this development merely brought an aggravation of the crisis, for this power-will of the West gradually awakened the slumbering masses of the outer world to political activity. Before the inner war of classes had been liquidated, the outer war of races had begun. Annihilation-wars and World Wars, continuous internal strain in the form of unrelenting class-war, which regards outer war merely as a means of increasing its demands, the revolt of the colored races against the Western Civilization — these are the forms which this terrible crisis takes in the 20th century. The peak of this long crisis exists now, in the period 1950–2000, and possibly in these very years will be decided forever the question whether the West is to fulfill its last life-phase. The proud Civilization which in 1900 was master of 18/20ths of the earth’s surface, arrived at the point in 1945, after the suicidal Second World War, where it controlled no part whatever of the earth. World power for all great questions was decided in two outer capitals, Washington and Moscow. The smaller questions of provincial administration were left to the nations-become-colonies of the West, but in power-questions, the regimes based in Russia and America decided all. Where formal control was left with Europe, as in Palestine, actual control

63 was retained in Washington. The food-rations, trade-union policy, leaders, and tasks of the former Western nations were decided upon outside of Europe. In 1900, the State-system of Europe reacted as a unit when the negative will of Asia thought, by the Boxer rebellion, to drive out the Imperialism of the West from China. Western armies from the leading States moved in, and smashed the revolt. Less than half a century later, extra-European armies are moving freely about Europe, armies containing Negroes, Mongols, Turkestani, Kirghizians, Americans, Armenians, colonials and Asiatics of all areas. How did this happen? Quite obviously, through the inner division of the West. This division was not material — material cannot divide men if their minds agree. No, it was spiritual division that brought Europe into the dust. Half of Europe had a completely different attitude toward Life, a different valuation of Life, from the other half. The two attitudes were respectively the 19th century outlook, and the 20th century outlook. The division continues, and the amount of food a man in the Western Civilization can eat is dependent on the decision of someone in Moscow or Washington. When the spiritual division of Europe comes to an end the extra-European powers will be unable to hold down the strong-willed populations of Europe. The first step in action is thus the liquidation of the spiritual division of Europe. There is only one basis on which this can be done; there is only one Future, the organic Future. The only changes that can be brought about in a Culture are those which its life-stage necessitates. The 20th century outlook is synonymous with the Future of the West, the perpetuation of the 19th century outlook means the continuation of the domination of the West by Culture-distorters and barbarians. The task of the present work is the presentation of all the fundamentals of the

64 20th century outlook necessary as the framework for comprehending and thorough action. First is the Idea — not an ideal which can be summed up in a catchword, or one which can be explained to an alien, but a living, breathing, wordless feeling, which already exists in all Westerners, articulate in a very few, inchoate in most. This Idea, in its wordless grandeur, its irresistible imperative, must be felt, and thus only men of the West can assimilate it. The alien will understand it as little as he has always understood Western creations and Western codes. In his victory parade in Moscow in 1945, the barbarian exhibited his Western captive slaves to the jeering crowds of his cities, and made them drag their national flags behind them in the dust. If any Westerner thinks that the barbarian makes nice distinctions between the former nations of the West, he is incapable of understanding the feelings of populations outside a High Culture toward that Culture. Tomorrow the captive slaves offered up to the annihilation-instincts of the Moscow mobs may be drawn from Paris, London, Madrid, as well as from Berlin. A continuation of the spiritual division of the West makes this not only possible but absolutely inevitable. Both the outer forces are working for the continued division of the West; within they are helped by the least worthy elements in Europe. This is addressed however to the only people that matter — the Westerners who can feel the Imperative of the Future working within them. It is necessary that their world-outlook be the same in all its fundamentals, and we know in this historical age that the prevailing spirituality of an age is a function of its soul, and that comparatively little latitude is allowed in its necessary formulation. Therefore, the present work contains not arguments, but commands of the Spirit of the Age. These thoughts and values are necessary for us. They are not personal, but super-personal

65 and compulsory for men who intend to do something with their lives. Our action-task is dictated for us by the fact that the soil of our Civilization is occupied by the outsider. Our inner imperative and outlook on Life is determined for us by the Age. A part of the outlook of any age is simply the negation of the outlook of the previous age. Each age has to assert its new spirit against its predecessor, which would continue, even in the stage of rigor mortis, to dominate the spiritual landscape of the Culture. In establishing itself, the new spirit must deny the hostile old one. In a substantial part, therefore, our 20th century outlook is the negative of the 19th century materialism. Having destroyed this dank ruin, it erects over it its own, appropriate, view of the world and Life. Since this is written for those whose world-view is researched to its very foundations, the preliminary, negative, aspect must be equally thorough. The world view of the millions is the task of journalism, but those who think independently have an inner necessity for a comprehensive picture. The great foundations of the old outlook were Rationalism and Materialism. They will be completely examined in this work, but here it is proposed to treat only three thought-systems, Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism, products of materialistic thought, all of which were the focus of great spiritual energy in the 19th century, and which, continuing to have a vogue in the early 20th century, contributed greatly to lead Europe into its present abyss.

66 Darwinism One of the most fruitful discoveries of the 20th century was the metaphysics of nations. The unveiling of the Riddle of History showed that nations are different manifestations of the soul of the High Cultures. They exist only in Cultures, they have their life span for political purposes, and possess — vis-à-visthe other nations of the Culture — individuality. Each great nation is given an Idea, a life-mission, and the history of the nation is the actualizing of this Idea. This Idea, again, must be felt, and cannot be directly defined. Each Idea, to actualize which a given nation was chosen by the Culture, is also a stage of the development of the Culture. Thus Western History presents during the recent centuries, a Spanish period, a French period, an English period. They correspond to Baroque, Rococo, and early Civilization. These nations owed their spiritual and political supremacy during these years solely to the fact that they were the custodians of the Spirit of the Age. With the passing of the Age, these custodians of its Spirit lost their spiritually dominating position in the Culture.

67 The early Civilization was the English period of the West, and all the thought and activity of the whole Civilization was on the English