Spengler’s lack of respect for the phenomena has a twofold cause. It is due in part to his overweening conceit, in part to his lack of experience. Like Toynbee, he is truly familiar only with classical antiquity and its western descendant. His _Urmensch_, his “primordial man,” is the Greek or the Aryan Indian.[11] He ignores altogether the work of those who have ventured outside the familiar in order to meet an alien spirit on its own terms—the anthropologists, or, more precisely, the ethnologists or cultural anthropologists. These scholars have come up against behaviour defying every modern norm in their personal contact with primitive peoples, and in their encounters discovered an approach to the study of alien cultures which the historian of antiquity would be wise to make his own. The ethnologist will not take for granted savage customs and usages which seem comprehensible—even familiar—to him. For he has observed that cultural traits cannot be studied in isolation since they are integral parts of a whole—the given civilization—and derive their meaning from the particular whole in which they occur. Ruth Benedict, in her lucid _Patterns of Culture_, states the case as follows: It is in cultural life as it is in speech: selection is the prime necessity.... We must imagine a great arc on which are ranged the possible interests provided either by the human age-cycle or by the environment or by man’s various activities. A culture that capitalized even a considerable proportion of these would be as unintelligible as a language that used all the clicks, all the glottal stops, all the labials, dentals, sibilants and gutturals from voiceless to voiced, and from oral to nasal. Its identity as a culture depends upon the selection of some segments of this arc. Every human society everywhere has made such a selection in its cultural institutions. Each, from the point of view of another, ignores fundamentals and exploits irrelevancies. One culture hardly recognizes monetary values; another has made them fundamental in every field of behaviour. In one society technology is unbelievably slighted even in those aspects of life which seem necessary to ensure survival; in another, equally simple, technological achievements are complex and fitted with admirable nicety to the situation. One builds an enormous cultural superstructure upon adolescence, one upon death, one upon afterlife.[12] Hence—and as a warning to those who are partial to utilitarian explanations: “The importance of an institution in a culture gives no direct indication of its usefulness or its inevitability,”[13] for cultural behaviour is integrated and the whole determines the significance of the parts: