Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/39

position, and combination to do service for the forty or fifty thousand characters, which the love of working at this concrete end of the mental process has wrought out. The language itself is still a monosyllabic heap of atoms^[1] after twenty centuries of existence. As in the lowest forms of animal life, so here, there is no separation of functions; each word may serve for all parts of speech in turn, all specialization being effected by external devices only. The verb and the noun are not formally distinguished. How could they be held apart, so long as the ideal and the actual were not mentally separated? The fact standing there is the only reality; and human action can only come to that, producing no essential change in things. Similar phenomena, however, may be found in the languages of realistic races of the highest culture.

Illustrated by the written language.

Ampére, many years ago, ascribed the inflexibility of Chinese words to the "curious accident of an ideographic writing, invented at a primitive epoch and always preserved." It was not, as we have just seen, a "curious accident," but a natural result of predominant mental qualities. These oldest forms were the bare picturing of ideas by the concrete objects which really meant or symbolically suggested them. When a child learned an idea by the written language, it was only as an embodied fact. Thus, obedience was represented, not by a series of letters conveying no visible image and leaving the mind free to hold fast the abstraction, but by two characters which painted the very act of obeying, - a child at the feet of an old man; comfort, by a woman under a roof; compassion, by a heart and blood; fear, by two eyes placed obliquely and drawn together at the corners; death, by a sepulchral urn; succession, by one man behind another. Simpler forms are a sun and a moon, for brightness; for