It is, however, much the same whether the past is treated in the spirit of Don Quixote or in that of Sancho Panza. Neither way leads to the end. In sum, each school permits itself to bring into high relief that part of the Classical which best expresses its own views—Nietzsche the pre- Socratic Athens, the economists the Hellenistic period, the politicians Republican Rome, poets the Imperial Age. Not that religious and artistic phenomena are more primitive than social and economic, any more than the reverse. For the man who in these things has won his unconditional freedom of outlook, beyond _all_ personal interests whatsoever, there is no dependence, no priority, no relation of cause and effect, no differentiation of value or importance. That which assigns relative ranks amongst the individual detail-facts is simply the greater or less purity and force of their form-language, their symbolism, beyond all questions of good and evil, high and low, useful and ideal. ----- Footnote 21: As will be seen later, the words _zivilisierte_ and _Zivilisation_ possess in this work a special meaning.—_Tr._ Footnote 22: English not possessing the adjective-forming freedom of German, we are compelled to coin a word for the rendering of _grossstädtisch_, an adjective not only frequent but of emphatic significance in the author’s argument.—_Tr._ ----- XII Looked at in this way, the “Decline of the West” comprises nothing less than the problem of _Civilization_. We have before us one of the fundamental questions of all higher history. What is Civilization, understood as the organic-logical sequel, fulfilment and finale of a culture? For every Culture has _its own_ Civilization. In this work, for the first time the two words, hitherto used to express an indefinite, more or less ethical, distinction, are used in a _periodic_ sense, to express a strict and necessary _organic succession_. The Civilization is the inevitable _destiny_ of the Culture, and in this principle we obtain the viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical morphology become capable of solution. Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again.