that the values of different cultures may be incommensurate when he frankly epitomized his description of Ancient Egypt in the statement that its laws and customs were, on the whole, the opposite of those of the rest of mankind.[8] This peculiar integration of the facts satisfied a Greek facing Barbarians. We, however, seek understanding. We can be resigned neither to registering astonishment nor to accepting the solution which a misconceived regard for objectivity sometimes proposes: a mere chronicling of the facts. We cannot rest content when we know that the Egyptians considered their king a god, entombed him in a pyramid, buried cats and dogs, and mummified their dead. We want to recover the cultural “form” in which these odd phenomena find their proper place and meaning. But it is a laborious, and never completed, task to rediscover the original coherence of a past mode of life from the surviving remains. Spengler attempts short cuts; overrating the extent of his truly remarkable erudition, and, for the rest, trusting recklessly his intuition, he forces the evidence to fit the schemata which he has conceived. He describes, for instance, the bearer of Egyptian civilization as follows: The Egyptian soul—pre-eminently gifted for and inclined towards history, striving with primeval passion towards the infinite—experienced past and future as its entire universe, and the present ... but as a narrow borderland between two measureless distances. The Egyptian civilization is an embodiment of concern—the soul’s correlate of distance—concern with the future, manifest in the choice of granite and basalt as the material for sculpture, in the engraved documents, in the elaboration of a masterly system of administration and a net of irrigation works; of necessity a concern with the past is linked with this concern for the future.[9]