Spengler's essay, which appeared in 1904 as a dissertation for his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Halle, had a remarkable impact at the beginning of our century because of the originality of its interpretation of the Heraclitean doctrine. It outlined some of the essential features of Spengler's own thought, who, like Lassalle sixty years earlier, had found in the Heraclitean doctrine, or rather in his own interpretation of it, a path of orientation and formation for his personal philosophical construction.

In the author's words: "Heraclitus's world of thought, viewed as a whole, appears as a grandly conceived poem, a tragedy of the cosmos, equal to the tragedies of Aeschylus in their powerful sublimity. Among the Greek philosophers, with the possible exception of Plato, he is the most important poet. The idea of an eternal and never-ending struggle that forms the content of life in the cosmos, in which an imperious law reigns and a harmonious regularity is maintained, is a high creation of Greek art, to which this thinker was far closer than to natural science proper."