In describing the death of a civilization Spengler is likewise under the spell of scientific notions. This is not obvious; in fact, Spengler’s success is largely due to the plausibility of some of his most imaginative statements. We feel that it makes sense, even that it is illuminating, to speak of a youthful, or ageing, or dying civilization. But for Spengler such phrases are not metaphors; and when he speaks (as in the previous quotation) of a civilization’s dying “when it has realized the sum total of its potentialities,” he believes that he refers to a state of affairs as inevitable and as accurately predictable as the withering of a plant. He actually calls civilizations “living beings of the highest order,”[5] and he undertakes to state with precision which phenomena characterize each stage in their life-cycle. For him, an imperialistic and socialistic order follow a traditional and hierarchical society; expanding technique and trade follow greatness in art, music, and literature as certainly as the dispersal of the seeds follows the maturing of a plant which will never flower again. But to take the biological metaphor literally, to grant in this manner reality to an image, is not morphology but mythology; and it is belief, not knowledge, which induces Spengler to deny the freedom of the spirit and the unpredictability of human behaviour. Spengler substitutes the mystery of natural life for the dynamics of history which he, therefore, fails entirely to explain.[6] But to the aspect of “form” he has done justice as few before him. Here too, however, he goes much too far. It is one thing to stress the singularity of each great epoch of the past as a prerequisite of deeper understanding, and quite another to declare the discontinuity of cultural achievements to be absolute. Had the first been Spengler’s intention, no one who had once comprehended the uniqueness of a historical situation, a work of art, or an institution, would have quarrelled with his dictum: “Each civilization has its own possibilities of expression, which appear, mature and wither, and never recur.”[7] When he states, furthermore, “I see in world-history the image of a perennial configuration and transfiguration, a wonderful formation and dissolution of organic forms. The professional historian, however, sees in it the image of a tape-worm which tirelessly puts forth period after period,” there is enough truth in this scathing remark for it to strike home. It is a negative truth, but it is born of a true perception of the poverty of our usual view of history as an evolutionary process. This view encourages us to project the axioms, habits of thought, and norms of the present day into the past, which, as a result, seems to contain little that is unfamiliar to us. It is remarkable how rarely historians of ancient or alien civilizations have guarded themselves against that danger. In this respect Herodotus was more perspicacious; he realized