from: Oswald Spengler

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens
out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and
detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and
mortal thing from the boundless and enduring.  It blooms
on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which
plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when the soul has
actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of
peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and
reverts into the proto-soul. But its living existence, that
sequence of great epochs which define and display the
stages of fulfillment, is an inner passionate struggle to
maintain the Idea against the powers of Chaos without
and the unconscious muttering deep-down within. It is not
only the artist who struggles against the resistance of the
material and the stifling of the idea within him.  Every
Culture stands in a deeply-symbolical, almost in a mystical,
relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through
which it strives to actualize itself. The aim once attained --
the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled
and made externally actual -- the Culture suddenly hardens,
it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down.
. . . This -- the inward and outward fulfillment, the finality,
that awaits every living Culture -- is the purport of all
the historic "declines".