"What makes the man of the world-cities incapable of living on any but this artificial footing is that the cosmic beat in his being is ever decreasing, while the tensions of his waking consciousness become more and more dangerous.... Beat and tension, blood and intellect, Destiny and Causality, are to one another as the countryside in bloom is to the city of stone, as something existing per se to something existing dependently. Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness. But Civilisation is nothing but tension. 

 "Intelligence is only the capacity for understanding at high tension.... The advance too, from peasant wisdom - "slimness", mother wit, instinct, based as in other animals on the sensed beat of life - through the city-spirit to the cosmopolitan intelligence - the very word with its sharp ring betraying the disappearance of the old cosmic foundation - can be described as a steady diminution of the Destiny-feeling and an unrestrained augmentation of needs according to the operation of a Causality.

"Intelligence is the replacement of unconscious living by the exercise of thought, masterly, but bloodless and jejeune...."

Spengler