In his book "The Decline of the West", Oswald Spengler harps, so to speak, upon a variation of an old theme--that history repeats itself. Every civilization, he says, travels the same path; every one has a spring, a summer, an autumn and a winter. There is nothing new under the sun.

Certainly his theory seems to fit nicely with the general tendencies not only of history in its narrow sense, but of human activity as a whole. Even the ancient China of 500 B.C. had a romantic rebound from classicism with a feeling kindred to that of the contemporary West, and its prophet in Chuang-Tzn, the spiritual twin of Rousseau.

The Chinese movement, known as Taoism was to Confucianism about what Romanticism is to Classicism. The Taoist claimed that the Chinese fell from the simple life--the ideal--into artificiality about the twenty-seventh century B.C. Man must now return to that idylic state, and few writers have ever set forth more entertainingly what may be called the Bohemian outlook upon life than Chuang-tzu.

This morning, Dr. Hu Shih, a Chinese scholar and father of the modern Chinese "renaissance" movement, will give a lecture at 12 o'clock today in Emerson J on the rise of Confucianism as a state religion, and the Taoist reaction.

Other lectures of interest are:

9 O'clock

"The First Child Labor Case," Professor Yeomans, Harvard 2, Government 19.

11 O'clock

"Herder on Shakespeare," Professor Howard, German 7, Widener B.

"The Drift Toward Disunion, 1855-58," Professor Schlesinger, History 32b, New Lecture Hall.

"The Character of Gothic Architecture," Professor Edgell, Fine Arts 1d, New Fogg Museum.

12 O'clock

"Series and Parallel Circuits," Professor Black, Physics B. Jefferson Laboratory 1.

"Aeschylus' Chephoroe," Professor Gulick, Greek 11, Sever 26.