TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
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 Abend-
landes" appeared in July, 1918, that is, at the very turning-point of the four
years' World-War. It was conceived, the author tells us, before 1914 and
fully worked out by 1917. 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 war would find it. 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. 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 authoritative learning.
Spengler's was not the only, nor indeed the most " popular," philosophical
product of the German revolution. In the graver conjunctures, sound minds
do not dally with the graver questions — they either face and attack them
with supernormal resolution or thrust them out of sight with an equally
supernormal effort to enjoy or to endure the day as it comes. 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. And, if it is none too
easy even for the victors of the struggle to shake off its sequelae, 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. 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. 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 1919-1910.
To assume the role of critic and to compare Spengler's with other
philosophies of the present phase of Germany, as to respective intrinsic
weights, is not the purpose of this note nor within the competence of its
writer. On the other hand, it is unconditionally necessary for the reader to
