Feb 24, 2019
What we call "the history of mathematics" -implying merely the progressive actualizing of a single invariable ideal - is in fact, below the deceptive surface of history, a complex of self-contained and independent developments, an ever-repeated process of bringing to birth new form-worlds and appropriating, transforming and sloughing alien form-worlds, a purely organic story of blossoming, ripening, wilting and dying within the set period.
Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West, pg. 45)
