8 THE PATH OF SCIENCE 



with the gi'owth of wealth and leisure, they have been the 

 prey of external aggressors. The aggressors have flourished 

 and have in turn relapsed into weakness and perished. Thus 

 the history of individual nations shows a cyclic rhythm. 



Another cyclic theory of history has been developed by 

 Oswald Spengier in his famous book, The Decline of the 

 West. Spengier presents history as a succession of cultures, 

 each of which follows a definite coinse of development 

 through a sequence of phases. He holds that each culture 

 has its own peculiarities but that the course of development 

 through the phases is the same for all. Thus each culture 

 has its beginning, its development based essentially on rural 

 life. It then blossoms into full strength, with the urban 

 population taking control of the thought of the nation until, 

 finally, there comes a decay, particularly of religion and of 

 inward life, and a collapse of the culture as a whole. A 

 necessary part of Spengler's argument is that the same phases 

 are distinguishable in all cultures. He treats the Renaissance 

 as a revolt against the Gothic, the exhaustion of the early 

 phase of modern culture. Similar revolts occurred in Egypt 

 at the close of the Old Kingdom Avith the development of the 

 feudal system and in Greece at the close of the archaic period, 

 though, surely, the corresponding period in Greek culture 

 should be that at which the Hellenistic displaced the Hel- 

 lenic. Spengier carries these analogies to the individuals of 

 the phases. He considers Napoleon a parallel to Alexander. 



An excellent analysis of Spengler's -^v ork has been made by 

 Colling^vood, who points out that Spengier carries this theory 

 to an extreme; every phase and every detail reappears in 

 each cycle.* Since obviously this is not true of history, the 

 cycles cannot be identical. Rather, they must be homologous 

 —in each cycle the events and personalities must correspond 

 structurally to events and personalities of the past. The task 

 of the historian is, therefore, parallel to that of the compara- 

 tive anatomist; he inust depict the correspondence of the 



* R. G. Collingwood, "Oswald Spengier and the Theory of Historical 

 Cycles," Antiquity, I, 311 (1927). 



