To assume the rôle of critic and to compare Spengler’s with other philosophies of the present phase of Germany, as to respective intrinsic weights, is the purpose of this note nor within the competence of its writer. So it was with sound minds in the post-Jena Germany of Jahn and Fichte, and so it was also with such minds in the Germany of 1919-1920. It goes through a period of material difficulty (often extreme difficulty) and one in which pride of achievement and humility in the presence of unsuccess work dynamically together. And, if it is none too easy even for the victors of the struggle to shake off its sequelæ to turn back to business as the normal and to give no more than amateur effort and dilettantish attention to the very deep things, for the defeated side this is impossible.
Even after the return to normality, it is no longer possible for men-at any rate for Western men-not to know that these questions exist. In the graver conjunctures, sound minds do not dally with the graver questions-they either face and attack the with supernormal resolution or thrust them out of sight with an equally supernormal effort to enjoy or to endure the day as it comes. Spengler’s was not the only, nor indeed the most popular, philosophical product of the German revolution. Its very title was so apposite to the moment as to predispose the higher intellectuals to regard it as a work of the moment-the more so as the author was a simple Oberlehrer and unknown to the world of the authoritative learning. But inevitably the public impulse to read it arose in and from post-war conditions, and thus it happened that this severe and difficult philosophy of history found a market that has justified the printing of 90,000 copies. So far as he is concerned, then, the impulse to create it arose from a view of our civilization not as the late war left it, but (as he says expressly) as the coming was would find it.
It was conceived, the author tells us, before 1914 and fully worked out by 1917. It must be left to critics to say whether it was Destiny or Incident-using these words in the author’s sense-that Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes appeared in July, 1918, that is, at the very turning-point of the four years’ World-War.
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