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
Ordered, for us, by the Christian chronology and the ancient-mediæval-
modern scheme. It was on those foundations that, from early Gothic
times, the images of religion and of art have been built up in which a
large part of Western humanity continues to live. To predicate the
same of Plato or Phidias is quite impossible, whereas the Renaissance
artists could and did project a classical past, which indeed they
permitted to dominate their judgments completely.
Footnote 132:
See pp. 9. et seq.
Footnote 133:
The Indian history of our books is a Western reconstruction from texts
and monuments. See the chapter on epigraphy in the “Indian Gazetteer,”
Vol. II.—_Tr._
Footnote 134:
See Vol. II, pp. 482, 521 et seq.
Footnote 135:
There is one famous episode in Greek history that may be thought to
contradict this—the race against time of the galley sent to Mitylene
to countermand the order of massacre (Thucydides, III, 49). But we
observe that Thucydides gives twenty times the space to the debates at
Athens that he gives to the drama of the galley-rowers pulling night
and day to save life. And we are told that it was the Mitylenean
ambassadors who spared no expense to make it worth the rowers’ while
to win, whereupon “there arose such a zeal of rowing that....” The
final comment is, strictly construing Thucydides’s own words: “Such
was the magnitude of the danger that Mitylene passed by” (παρὰ
τοσοῦτον μὲν ἡ Μυτιλήνη ἦλθε κινδύνου), a phrase which recalls
forcibly what has just been said regarding the “situation-drama.”—
_Tr._
Footnote 136:
Besides the clock, the bell itself is a Western “symbol.” The passing-
bell tolled for St. Hilda of Whitby in 680, and a century before that
time bells had come into general use in Gaul both for monasteries and
for parish churches. On the contrary, it was not till 865 that
Constantinople possessed bells, and these were presented in that year
by Venice. The presence of a belfry in a Byzantine church is accounted
a proof of “Western influence”: the East used and still largely uses
mere gongs and rattles for religious purposes. (British Museum
“Handbook of Early Christian Antiquities)”.—_Tr._
Footnote 137:
May we be permitted to guess that the Babylonian sun-dial and the
Egyptian water-clock came into being “simultaneously,” that is, on the
threshold of the third millennium before Christ? The history of clocks
is inwardly inseparable from that of the calendar; it is therefore to
be assumed that the Chinese and the Mexican Cultures also, with their
deep sense of history, very early devised and used methods of time-
measurement.
(The Mexican Culture developed the most intricate of all known systems
of indicating year and day. See British Museum “Handbook of May on
Antiquities.”—_Tr._)
Footnote 138:
Let the reader try to imagine what a Greek would feel when suddenly
made acquainted with this custom of ours.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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