Read Spengler

The whole thesis in miniature: history has a form, Cultures are organisms, and the West is in its winter.

Every Culture has its own mathematic; number is a symbol of the soul, not a universal truth.

Two ways of knowing: the systematic (Nature, causality) and the physiognomic (History, destiny).

Destiny is the logic of time; Causality the logic of space. History can only be felt, not calculated.

A Culture's whole world grows from one root-intuition of space — its prime-symbol.

The three souls named: Apollinian (the body), Magian (the cavern), Faustian (infinite space).

Each Culture chooses its arts: the statue for the Classical, the fugue and oil-painting for the West.

The nude and the portrait: Classical surface against Faustian depth and biography.

Psychology is itself a Culture-form: each soul pictures itself in its own image.

Buddhism, Stoicism and Socialism: the 'contemporary' final moralities of three Cultures.

Even physics is a faith: each Culture's science is a myth of its own soul, and ours dissolves into pure function.

Life in two keys: the cosmic 'being' that pulses in the blood, and the waking-being of the free-moving microcosm.

Why the high Cultures are so few, how they stand together as a group, and what 'world-history' really surveys.

How Cultures meet, borrow and deform one another — the germ of the 'pseudomorphosis' worked out later.

World-history is the history of the city: the city turns peasant into citizen, and at last into the nomad of the metropolis.

Race, people and tongue are not biology but destiny — what a landscape and a history stamp on a stream of being.

Before and after a Culture: the primitive peoples that come before it, and the 'fellaheen' who outlive it.

When a young soul is forced into the alien mould of an older Culture — the Magian cramped beneath Classical forms.

The Magian world: the cavern-feeling, the divine substance, the consensus of the faithful — the soul behind the great religions.

Religion in the springtime of three Cultures — Classical cult, Magian revelation, Faustian Puritanism.

The great estates — nobility and priesthood, time against space, the manor against the cathedral — as a Culture's living form.

The state as a people held 'in form': the history-making minority, the political stream, and the meaning of the great event.

What it means to be 'in form' politically — the statesman against the masses, and the state's slow sinking into mere economics.

Money as a Faustian way of thinking — abstract, dynamic — that turns the world into book-keeping and dissolves the old estates.

The machine as the Faustian will-to-power made iron: the engineer, the entrepreneur, and the gathering revolt against the machine.

Technics is not the tool but the tactics of living — the whole way a being wages its war with the world.

Two forms of life: the herbivore that flees and the beast of prey that hunts — and man, by his soul, is a beast of prey.

The hand and the tool make man: the free hand that seizes a weapon turns the beast of prey into the maker.

Speech and the deed-in-common: work is organized, the 'enterprise' is born, and the leaders divide from the led.

The Faustian machine-culture masters the world — and races toward its own exhaustion and end.