d his action entirely, as _I am after
eating_. In some grammars, as in Maya, the verbal concept starts with
the past; in others, as our own, we live in the present; in the Welsh,
the future is the chief tense. The mere choice of _shall_ or _will_ as
the first person future auxiliary denotes a specific mental quality.

Now the expression of all these infinite shades of relationtionship[TN-5]
between the self, the activity and the world, is achieved in two ways:
position or placement--syntax; and form. The customary division of
languages is into Monosyllabic, Agglutinative, Incorporating, and
Inflectional, and this division will suit our purpose, though it must be
used with care. It is held in the ordinary theory that these classes must
represent successive stages of linguistic perfection, each in turn being
higher in the scale than the other, they having grown one from the other
as the race advanced. By the theory the monosyllabic is lower than the
agglutinative, and inherently less useful. But the theory does not work
out in practical application to the facts we have to deal with, for while
we cannot find still left in the world any agglutinative languages
representative of sufficient culture to bring into our present
consideration, we do find a monosyllabic in the highest rank, and meeting
the highest cultural requirements. In short, the latter may be
theoretically the inferior tool, but the genius of thought behind is
greater than the form. One man can draw a masterpiece with a burnt stick,
another only paint a daub with all the brushes made. Once again we must
not judge by our preconceived preferences of form.

Omitting therefore the modern remnants of agglutinating languages,
outside of America, as affording us no literary material of value for
our study, we shall find at once drawn across all the other great
classes a single broad line of division, between the ideographic and the
literal--the same as already mentioned. And the moment we draw this line
as an exponent of the mental and spiritual thought-life of the different
peoples, we shall find it not only molding their language forms, both
written and spoken, but manifest as well in their art, philosophy, and
even their social polity. And of course we must be fair in our
comparisons, and not set a Chinese coolie in the concrete against an
English statesman, nor any concrete example of another kind of culture
in its decay with the highest bloom to which we believe