Books: Patterns in Chaos

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THE DECLINE OF THE WEST—Vol. II—Perspectives of World History—Oswald Spengler—Translated from the German by Charles Francis Atkinson—Knopf ($7.50).

Beset by doubts, historical philosophers base their theories on one certitude. Civilizations are never static. They are always in motion, creatively toward stronger outpourings of their spirit or destructively toward decay and dissolution. Thus Western civilization, with its vaulting expression in Gothic cathedrals, Beethoven, da Vinci, Einstein, Manhattan's sun-smitten towers, is either seething onward toward mightier transactions, more luminous cultural & scientific manifestations, or suffering the nervous, senile disintegration which desolated Rome, Egypt, ancient China.

H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, seeing everywhere harbingers of Western obsolescence, nevertheless resist this unpleasant evidence with faith in the perpetual constructive force of human will & intellect. Oswald Spengler of Munich scorns such precarious optimism as only another instance of the pathetic pride which Romans, Egyptians and Orientals felt at the height of their refulgence.

Spengler is historian, mathematician, esthete, economist, political scientist, philosopher. With a curious and powerful alternation of Teutonic intellectual despotism and entranced mysticism, he analyzes history by huge analogies. Civilizations he sees as emerging & disappearing in cycles, each one, like a flower, experiencing birth, growth, decay, death. Our own Western civilization he declares to be in the phase of decay, characterized by material expansion, effete spirituality. Collapse is imminent in perhaps 300 years. But by that time another human group will be unwittingly generating a new civilization to flourish and sink in its own long turn. Herein lies the refutation of the charge of pessimism applied to Spengler by lesser minds. Regarding civilizations as organisms, he is no more the pessimist than any man who recognizes the transient nature of all organic life.

When the first volume of The Decline of the West appeared in Germany a few years ago, thousands of copies were sold. Cultivated European discourse quickly became Spengler-saturated. Spenglerism spurted from the pens of countless disciples. It was imperative to read Spengler, to sympathize or revolt. It still remains so. The second volume, treating of the kinship of _ plants, animals, men, parallels of law, cities & cultures, languages, religions, ethics & morals, stimulates further astonishment and elation. These are fruits of contact with perhaps the most colossal mind of our age, a mind which forces wondrous patterns on the chaos of history, which perceives equally stirring significances in Greek , the French revolution, a Byzantine mosaic.