The decline of the West, Volume 2 : $b Perspectives of world-historySpengler, Oswald
History
The decline of the West, Volume 2 : $b Perspectives of world-history
Spengler, Oswald
Civilization -- History
The nature- (science-) picture of the child and the primitive develops
out of the petty technique of every day, which perpetually forces both
of them to turn away from the fearful contemplation of wide nature to
the critique of the facts and situations of their near environment.
Like the young animal, the child discovers its first truths through
play. Examining the toy, cutting open the doll, turning the mirror
round to see what is behind it, the feeling of triumph in having
established something as correct for good and all--no nature-research
whatsoever has got beyond this. Primitive man applies this critical
experience, as he acquires it, to his arms and tools, to the materials
for his clothing, food, and housing--i.e., to things _in so far as they
are dead_. He applies it to animals as well when suddenly they cease
to have meaning for him as living beings whose movements he watches
and divines as pursuer or pursued, and are apprehended mechanically
instead of vitally, as aggregates of flesh and bone for which he has a
definite use--exactly as he is conscious of an event, now as the act
of a dæmon and a moment afterwards as a sequence of cause and effect.
The mature man of the Culture transposes in exactly the same way, every
day and every hour. Here, too, is a “nature”-horizon, and beyond it
lies the secondary plane formed of our impressions of rain, lightning,
and tempest, summer and winter, moon-phases and star-courses. But at
that plane religiousness, trembling with fear and awe, forces upon man
criteria of a far higher kind. Just as in the history-picture he sounds
the ultimate facts of life, so here he seeks to establish the ultimate
truths of nature. What lies beyond any attainable frontier of knowledge
he calls God, and all that lies within that frontier he strives to
comprehend--as action, creation, and manifestation of God--causally.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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