our own type to
be able to carry us.

It would be absurd to say that the ratiocinative, literal mind is higher
than the ideal. One man sees directly the meaning of the things, the
events and situations before him; another reasons it all out. And
contrary to many of our current beliefs, the former is often the man of
action; he sees at a flash to the heart of the matter, and gets things
done. His thought, his activity, is vivid; and his words are likely to
be so as well. The idealist, if he be broadminded, and not merely
sentimental, is indeed likely to be the practical man. And the type of
mind that is made manifest to us by these great non-Aryan languages and
their forms, is the former. Of course idealism in its decadence becomes
negative, inactive, self-consuming and no longer creative. But in its
bloom the direct vision may be even more active, more practical, than
are the reasoned processes.

Much ink and paper has been spent over the question whether the Chinese
hieroglyphs are ideograms or phonograms, whether the character
[Illustration: Chinese character], for instance, conveys to those using it
primarily the idea of Heaven, or the spoken word _T'ien_. It is
necessarily both, in a sense; it would not be written language
otherwise. And it is equally true that the letter-combination _Heaven_
is in a way as much to us a picture of the idea as of the sound; but the
difference of procedure is radical. The glyph is related to the idea
directly, the spelled word only through the formal combination of
symbols for single vocal speech-elements, meaningless when separate. The
relation of spoken sound to glyph is wholly adventitious; the relation
of the idea to the spelled word is equally adventitious. The ascent, if
we so call it, of written speech from the ideographic to the alphabetic,
is the descent of the thought further into material forms.[53-*] And
while it may be (and in the course of universal evolution rightly so)
necessary for our thought to descend into the bondage of matter and
form, for its knowledge and experience, and for the development of
matter and form into fitter vehicles of thought, nevertheless the
process is a binding and for a time an enchaining one, and the thought
is, for a time at least, likely to be lost in the confusion of forms.

Thus we may lay down as our fundamental proposition that a hieroglyphic
form of writing is better fitted to, and must properly, in the period of
its natural devel