Submitted by Serpentus on
"The plant lives and knows not that it lives. The animal lives and knows that it lives. Man is astounded by his life and asks questions about it. But even man cannot give an answer to his own questions, he can only believe in the correctness of his answer, and in that respect there is no difference between Aristotle and the meanest savage. "
Spengler contended that because most civilizations must pass through a life cycle, not only can the historian reconstruct the past but he can predict “the spiritual forms, duration, rhythm, meaning and product of the still unaccomplished stages of our Western history.” Unlike Arnold Toynbee, who later held that cultures are usually “apparented” to older cultures, Spengler contended that the spirit of a culture can never be transferred to another culture. He believed that the West had already passed through the creative stage of “culture” into that of reflection and material comfort (“civilization” proper, in his terminology) and that the future could only be a period of irreversible decline. Nor was there any prospect of reversing the process, for civilizations blossomed and decayed like natural organisms, and true rejuvenation was as impossible in the one case as the other. Spengler’s work won scant approval from professional scholars, who were scandalized by his unorthodox methods and contemptuous of his errors of fact. He was also criticized by the National Socialist Party, despite some affinity between his political ideas and Nazi dogma, and, after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Spengler lived in isolation until his death.