Note 7 — JOCASTA

Spenglerism is male religiosity and symbolism of the vulgar romantic as opposed to the refined classical kind. ‘The Faustian soul looks for an immortality to follow the bodily end, a sort of marriage with endless space ... till at last nothing remains visible but the indwelling depth-and-height energy of this self-extension.’ The historical mind (the ‘Faustian soul’) overcomes its perpetual temporariness by a perpetual give-and-take between itself and the Great Mother reality, whom it honours with its philosophical erections (what Herr Spengler calls third-dimensional extension) and from whom it receives sensations of infinity—the Great Mother’s gratitude for this masculine ‘conquest’ of herself. To the Spenglerist (the modernist) this infinity is vague, collective, metaphorical: ‘somehow we are in nature’; somehow ‘the “I” overwhelms the “Thou.”’ The scientific world, the Great Mother, is dead; it is the fairy-tale brought to life in each fresh embrace of it by the historical world. To the individual-realist (the classicist) the masculine extension is actual and personal rather than metaphorical and collective: the fairy-tale individual mind acquires an immediate ahistorical liveliness from its intercourse with the Great Scientific Mother. Herr Spengler despises the classical ahistorical attitude to reality. But overstudiously; for it is rather more than less than modern; it is based on the minute of the moment, not on the age of the moment. Both the collective-realist and the individual-realist function by sexual phantasia; the only difference between them being that the latter claims to be able to have closer contact with the Great Mother than the former—one merely historically, through the experience of the time-group to which he belongs, the other scientifically, through his experience now.