f. The national impulse has changed from achievement to
gratification, more and more sources are drawn upon to minister to its
enjoyment, and that enjoyment becomes an art; forms of every kind are
subtly refined in its service, and linguistic forms with them. And this
is then the very period when all these material, formal elements are
pointed to with pride as the evidence of culture and progress. The
thought-life of the nation has lost itself in the conflict and
confusion, in the distractions of the forms into which it has molded the
matter its creative force had entered.

We have thus in nations and languages, as in individuals, the phenomena
of birth, growth, use, and a quick or a slow death, all marked by
various degrees and signs of health or disease, and _every one at root a
moral question_. These are the facts of general average, quite
corresponding to those that form the bases for life insurance tables.
But, as with these latter, not only are there variations for
inheritance, class, locality, and so on, but there are here and there
cases of out and out exception--which from all we can see must be
assigned to some external force in operation on the individual. We call
them "freak" occurrences, only because we cannot see the wider law or
causes at work. When we meet them in sufficient numbers, we make new
tables to cover them as far as we can, again in general only. Other
causes still elude us, though they must have a fountain somewhere.

We have, as great exceptions to our general averages, two opposite
phenomena. One is the sudden inexplicable and dazzling rise on the
world's stage of a totally insignificant people, the other the seeming
arrest for long periods of time of the normal processes of even
incipient decay. And touching the latter point, it is strange indeed
that in two such widely different cultures as those of Iceland and China
we should find the same law apparently at work; the periods are vastly
unlike in actual, but not so in relative duration. We have no way of
properly placing the maintenance of Icelandic and Chinese as they have
been other than by simply laying down the existence of what we may call
a Law of Retardation, whose ultimate causes we cannot fathom or
classify, but which will stand as an opposite phase of the Law of
Stimulation, which is more frequent in operation, but is equally
unexplained.

If we will now regard the languages and cultures of the world, we will
find all the phas