The decline of the West, Volume 1 : $b Form and actualitySpengler, Oswald
Philosophy
The decline of the West, Volume 1 : $b Form and actuality
Spengler, Oswald
Civilization -- History
The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means
whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these means we are
enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world.
It is, and has always been, a matter of knowledge that the expression-
forms of world-history are limited in number, and that eras, epochs,
situations, persons are ever repeating themselves true to type. Napoleon
has hardly ever been discussed without a side-glance at Cæsar and
Alexander—analogies of which, as we shall see, the first is
morphologically quite inacceptable and the second is correct—while
Napoleon himself conceived of his situation as akin to Charlemagne’s.
The French Revolutionary Convention spoke of Carthage when it meant
England, and the Jacobins styled themselves Romans. Other such
comparisons, of all degrees of soundness and unsoundness, are those of
Florence with Athens, Buddha with Christ, primitive Christianity with
modern Socialism, the Roman financial magnate of Cæsar’s time with the
Yankee. Petrarch, the first passionate archæologist (and is not
archæology itself an expression of the sense that history is
repetition?) related himself mentally to Cicero, and but lately Cecil
Rhodes, the organizer of British South Africa, who had in his library
specially prepared translations of the classical lives of the Cæsars,
felt himself akin to the Emperor Hadrian. The fated Charles XII of
Sweden used to carry Quintus Curtius’s life of Alexander in his pocket,
and to copy that conqueror was his deliberate purpose.
Frederick the Great, in his political writings—such as his
_Considérations_, 1738—moves among analogies with perfect assurance.
Thus he compares the French to the Macedonians under Philip and the
Germans to the Greeks. “Even now,” he says, “the Thermopylæ of Germany,
Alsace and Lorraine, are in the hands of Philip,” therein exactly
characterizing the policy of Cardinal Fleury. We find him drawing
parallels also between the policies of the Houses of Habsburg and
Bourbon and the proscriptions of Antony and of Octavius.
Still, all this was only fragmentary and arbitrary, and usually implied
rather a momentary inclination to poetical or ingenious expressions than
a really deep sense of historical forms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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