It would seem that under such conditions world history is not feasible at all, and this has, in fact, been maintained by no less a historian than Ernst Troeltsch.[3] But Spengler thinks otherwise because he applies biological methods to the study of civilizations. The very word “morphology,” which figures in his sub-title, usually denotes the study of form and structure in plants and animals; it warns us to expect biological categories and these, indeed, abound. For instance, Spengler maintains that in different civilizations we can find not _analogues_—features similar as regards function—but only _homologues_—features similar as regards form. He also maintains that the life-cycle of each civilization runs through the same phases: youth, maturity, and senescence. This implies that a comparison of corresponding phases in different civilizations may be instructive, but that it is merely confusing to compare phases which do not correspond; for then one is led to expect, for instance, that an ageing civilization (like our own) might yet be able to produce great poetry or a live religion, which are features peculiar to civilizations in their youthful stage. The birth of civilization is succinctly described by Spengler in the following passage: It comes into flower on the soil of a precisely definable region, to which it remains linked with a plant-like attachment. A civilization dies when it has realized the sum total of its potentialities in the guise of peoples, languages, theologies, arts, states, sciences.[4] I have omitted certain untranslatable references to an _urseelenhafter Zustand_ from which civilizations are supposed to emerge and to which their “souls” return. For the quotation shows clearly that Spengler, notwithstanding these irrational additions, writes, like Toynbee, under the spell of the nineteenth century and attempts to interpret history in the terms of science. Even if we admit that the country in which a civilization arises influences its form, we must balk at Spengler’s formulation (repeated elsewhere in his work, _e.g._ I, 29) which approaches materialistic determinism. By interpreting the harmony between each civilization and its natural setting in this manner, he denies a freedom of the human spirit which—to name but one instance—the achievements of the Greeks in Sicily and southern Italy splendidly vindicate.