THE EARTHMANIST CULTURE: CITIES IN FLIGHT as a Spenglerian HistoryOswald Spengler's The Decline of the West has been acknowledged by lames Blish as one of the sources of CITIES IN FLIGHT. He has said, "My own 'Okie' stories were . . . founded in Spengler."Spengler is a difficult thinker-or at least a difficult writer-as anyone will discover who attempts to make a table similar to the one that appears with this Afterword. Part of the difficulty stems from our tendency to equate cultures with empires and other political units, a delusion from which Toynbee should have freed us even if Spengler did not. A related difficulty lies hi the title: "the decline of the West" inevitably suggests "the decline and fall of the Roman Empire," and one is likely to assume that Spengler is predicting the military conquest of the West rather than merely arguing that the West is in a certain kind of decline. Still another lies in the fact that Spengler uses the words culture and civilization sometimes in such a way that they appear to be synonymous with society, and sometimes as technical terms with opposed meanings. Whatever may be true of things, two words synonymous with a third are not necessarily equal to each other, and we should understand from the beginning that for Spengler, culture and civilization are opposed states in the spiritual history of a society: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 dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, iariis, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul. '. . .