When Nietzsche wrote down the phrase "transvaluation of all values" for the first time, the spiritual movement of the centuries in which we are living found at last its formula. Transvaluation of all values is the most fundamental character of every civilization. [Spengler characterizes the final dying phase of a Culture as Civilization.] For it is the beginning of a Civilization that it remoulds all the forms of the Culture that went before, understands them otherwise, practises them in a different way. It begets no more, but only reinterprets, and herein lies the negativeness common to all periods of this character. It assumes that the genuine act of creation has already occurred, and merely enters upon an inheritance of big actualities. In the late-Classical, we find the same taking place inside Helenistic-Roman Stoicism, that is, the long death-struggle of the Apollinian soul. In the interval from Socrates - who was the spiritual father of the Stoa and in whom the first signs of inward impoverishment and city-intellectualism became visible - to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, every existence-ideal of the old Classical underwent transvaluation... Even now the ethical socialism of the Faustian soul, its fundamental ethic, as we have seen, is being worked upon by the process of transvaluation as that soul is walled up in the stone of the great cities. Rousseau is the ancestor of this Socialism; he stands, like Socrates and Buddha, as the representative spokesman of a great civilization. Rousseau's rejection of all great Culture-forms and all significant conventions, his famous "Return to the state of Nature," his practical rationalism, are unmistakable evidences. Each of the three buried a millennium of spiritual depth. Each proclaimed his gospel to mankind, but it was to the mankind of the city intelligentsia, which was tired of the town and the Late culture, and whose "pure" (i.e. soulless) reason longed to be free from them and their authoritative form and their severity, from the symbolism with which it was no longer in living communion and which therefore it detested. The Culture was annihilated by dialectic. Socrates was a nihilist, and Buddha.

Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and amongst bodies and "facts." That which the one feels as Destiny the other understands as a linkage of causes and effects, and thenceforward he is a materialist - in the sense of the word valid for, and only vaid for, Civilization - whether he wills it or no, and whether Buddhist, Stoic or Socialist doctrines wear the garb of religion or not. — Spengler