“Sg PATTERNS OF CULTURE
have his own way with our civilization. There are the
strong men of action and the Babbitts as well as the
Faustians, and no ethnologically satisfactory picture of
modern civilization can ignore such constantly recurring
types. It is quite as convincing to characterize our cul-
tural type as thoroughly extrovert, running about in end-
less mundane activity, inventing, governing, and as
Edward Carpenter says, ‘endlessly catching its trains,” as
it is to characterize it as Faustian, with a longing for the
infinite.
Anthropologically speaking, Spengler's picture of world
civilizations suffers from the necessity under which he
labours of treating modern stratified society as if it had
the essential homogeneity of a folk culture. In our present
state of knowledge, the historical data of western Euto-
pean culture are too complex and the social differentiation
too through-going to yield to the necessary analysis. How-
ever suggestive Spengler's discussion of Faustian man is
for a study of European literature and philosophy, and
however just his emphasis upon the relativity of values,
his analysis cannot be final because other equally valid
pictures can be drawn. In the retrospect it may be possible
to characterize adequately a great and complex whole like
Western civilization, but in spite of the importance and
the truth of Spengler's postulate of incommensurable
destiny ideas, at the present time the attempt to interpret
the Western world in terms of any one selected trait re-
‘sults in confusion.
It is one of the philosophical justifications for the study
of primitive peoples that the facts of simpler cultures may
make clear social facts that are otherwise baffling and not
open to demonstration. This is nowhere more true than in
the matter of the fundamental and distinctive cultural
configurations that pattern existence and condition the
thoughts and emotions of the individuals who participate
in those cultures. The whole problem of the formation of