“A German historian, Oswald Spengler, popularized historical recurrence in the early 20th century. He believed that human cultures have a life cycle like those of natural organisms. As an individual person matures and grows old, so entire cultures experience a state of ripeness and then die when they have exhausted the possibilities inherent in their type. His theory presented in Decline of the West, proposed that western culture had reached that stage.
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…human cultures were like the various species of plant or animal life. Spengler declared:”I see in place of that empty figment of one linear history, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image…Each culture has its own new possibilities to 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.”