For Toynbee, a civilization is born when a "creative minority" successfully responds to the challenges posed by its physical, social, and political environment. But the fixation on the old methods of the "creative minority" leads it to eventually cease to be creative and degenerate into merely a "dominant minority" (that forces the majority to obey without meriting obedience), failing to recognize new ways of thinking. He argues that creative minorities deteriorate due to a worship of their "former self", by which they become prideful, and fail to adequately address the next challenge they face. Similarly, German philosopher Oswald Spengler discussed the transition from "Kultur" to "Zivilisation" in his "The Decline of the West" (1918).