The Decline of the West: Spengler's Key Claims

“Spengler, Decline of the West: 'It is not only that I see no progress, no goal, no way for mankind... I see no pious evolution, no kindly fate, no new day rising on a bright horizon. I see world-history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvellous waxing and waning of organic forms. The professional historian sees it differently...' [...] On the Faustian prime symbol: 'The Western soul wills the conquest of the infinite. The Gothic cathedral, the polyphonic fugue, the perspective painting, the differential calculus, these are not coincidences. They are the same soul expressing itself through different materials.' [...] On Winter civilization: 'The transition from Culture to Civilization was accomplished for the Classical world in the fourth, for the Western in the nineteenth century. From these periods onward the great intellectual decisions take place not in the whole world but in three or four Western cities... The provinces are no longer the soil from which the high culture draws its nourishment, they are its bureaucratic domain.' — Spengler, The Decline of the West (1918, 1922); Wikipedia 'The Decline of the West'; fogbanking.com 'Spengler's Winter'”