34.The Decline of the West
sort out the facts
I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can only be kept up by shutting one’s eyes to the overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mather reigion to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions its own life, will and feeling, its own death.
Here indeed are colors, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet discovered.
Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes, bloom and ages as the oaks and stone-pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves-but there is no aging “Mankind”.
Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return.
There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its
deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline.
These cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field.
They belong, like the plants and the animals to the living Nature of Geothe, and not to the dead Nature of Newton.
I see world-history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms.
The professional historian, on the contrary, sees it as a sort of tapeworm industriously adding on to itself one epoch after another…
This – the inward and outward fulfilment, the finality, that awaits every living Culture-is the purport of all the historic “declines”, amongst them that decline of the Classical which we kn
ow so well and fully, and another decline, entirely comparable to it in course and duration, which will occupy the first centuries of the coming millennium but is heralded already and sensible in and around us today-the decline of the West.
Every Culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man.
Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age.

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