_Introite, nam et hic dii sunt._
It is not my desire to add, as a conclusion to a comment bearing on the
restoration and interpretation of Mayan hieroglyphic texts, any general
discussion of the data which tradition and the early Spanish writers
have left us of the mythology, rites and customs of the American races;
and still less to run out a line of attractive analogies between
isolated instances of their words, symbols or works, with those of any
of the various nations of the other hemisphere; nor to build up any
theory of descent or intercourse with any of these latter as today known
to history. The subject before us is on its very face too vast; the
written and traditional data are entirely too scanty and too little
understood; and while we are still obliged to designate the various gods
and personages of the Codices as god A, B, etc., and are unable to fix
definitely[41-*] a single inscribed date in terms of our chronology, or
tell the event attached to it, fancied comparisons amount to little. And
the favorite "linguistic" method is more fragile yet, especially when
the uncertainties of spelling and transliteration are considered, and
above all the frequent total ignorance of the past history and changes
the different words compared must have gone through since the time when
by any possibility a physical transmission from one locality to the
other could have taken place. These ought to be commonplaces of
research, but it is to be feared that they have not quite yet become
so.[42-*] There is no need to give instances of such false analogies
which have served as the bases for a multitude of filiation theories,
all equally well "supported" by details, and all mutually exclusive. Nor
on the other hand can we deny the existence actually of a very great
number of resemblances and identities which cannot be ignored, but must
imply connexions of some kind. The English nation is not a Hebrew people
because it had a prime minister Disraeli, nor Greeks because they have a
Queen Alexandra, nor Romans because of certain local names. Such facts
even when real, and established as such, may only be evidence of a
single continental culture or transcontinental intercourse.
It has been the dictum of a certain school of archaeology, still very
much in general favor, that all these identities are to be explained as
the natural result of the innate tendencies of untutored men, on their
evolutionary rise, at certain cultural stages, to imagine the same myths
and invent the same rites. From this as a principle I wholly dissent; it
simply does not meet the facts. There are of course many facts to which
it does apply, such as those that both Chinese and Americans made paper,
tanned leather, made feather ornaments, used star and flower names for
their children, and so on: facts which had been used to prove Chinese
and American identity, and to which Dr. Brinton justly added in retort
that they also slept at night, wore clothes when it was cold, and so on.
But there is a very great number of facts, a number constantly growing
with research, which cannot be so dismissed. Such are the employment of
abstract symbolism, the erection of great structures all having a
definite and identical astronomical bearing and evident use, the common
possession of so-called myths all telling the one story, and only
slightly modified locally, such as the birth-stories of Huitzilopochtli
and of Herakles, and the stories of the travail of Latona pursued by the
Python and of the Woman clothed with the Sun in _Revelation_; or the
universal tradition of seven ancestral caves or cities in America,
compared with the Tibetan and Puranic stories of the seven lotus-leaves
of ['S]veta-dvipa, the first continental home of the race; the _Hacha de
cobre_ of the Miztecs and the ever-turning spear of jade of the Japanese
story of the place where the gods first descended on earth; or the whole
question of the origin of the Zodiac. These things, and a host of
others, need a different explanation--all the more since the more we are
learning of them the more we find that they enclose facts of which the
hypothetical "savage children" could not, _ex hypothesi_, have been
aware--some facts indeed which our very latest modern science is only
now learning.[43-*]
But while dissenting now wholly from this theory (of "coincidentalism")
one cannot but hold in all respect those who in their time held it. It
is the duty of the savant to make the best logical use he can of what he
has, and he cannot be criticised for not using finer scales than the
time affords. And this theory was needed as an answer to the
absurdities, brought out in utter disregard of physical possibilities,
postulating off-hand migrations and filiations and evolutionary advances
totally impossible within the periods allowed for their completion, and
utterly without parallel in any known part of the world or page of
history. And yet, when this theory had its birth, the most of
Christendom was still enthralled by the Ussherian chronology of the
creation and history of the whole divine universe, which simply did not
have room in it for all these things to happen naturally and
connectedly.
And if it is urged that present science had already say a generation
ago, a second's time we might say in the life of humanity, begun to
emancipate our ideas of time and evolution, still it is the fact that
that increase in breadth of vision has so far applied to every known
thing but man himself. The old belief that gave the world 6000 years of
life, at least put thinking man at its beginning; the modern nightmare
gives us a world for hundreds of millions of years without _thought_,
and makes human civilization an ephemeral episode of a few seconds of
universal duration. Disregarding, one is forced to say wilfully, the
fact that every single one of their own arguments in favor of anthropoid
descent for man would equally support a theory that the anthropoids are
debased offshoots of human stocks,[45-*] biology still demands such a
lapse of time for its physical evolution that its adherents oppose and
belittle to the utmost every bit of evidence of any antiquity even for
the physical frame of man. We have, to say nothing of the rest of the
world, Egyptian civilization now pushed back 10,000 years, and (together
with others as we slowly uncover them) as far removed as ever from
barbarism, if not indeed growing greater as we go back; but we are not
allowed anything but apelike, half arboreal savages 50,000 years ago.
And yet every observed _fact_ shows us savage or worn-out races
everywhere throughout the world deteriorating and dying out, and nowhere
any savages progressing or, unaided by outside influence, developing
what we know as civilization. We see everywhere the rise and fall of
nations, races and civilizations, and their utter blotting out; and we
refuse to accept that process as a universal law through which the
destiny of the human race is working itself out. In fact, we do not seem
to believe that the human race has any destiny; it may have beginning
and an end, but no destiny.
And so although this modern scientific school began as a reaction
against the narrowness of theological limitations, both of time and
greatness, so hampered and hypnotized has our thought been by both, that
man is of nearly as little universal account with one as with the
other, and we find a seemingly ineradicable repugnance to admit that any
people had "developed" writing before the least possible time ago we can
fix it, usually this side of the year 1 of the Christian era. And thus
we have M. Terrien de Lacouperie's "450 _embryo_ scripts and
writings"--which another fifty years may show to be nearly as many
fragments of one or a few great stocks of ancient hieroglyphs. Of course
it is impossible to derive the American races or civilizations from the
Chinese, Phoenicians, Hittites, or any of the cultures of the other
hemisphere, if we limit the latter to what we know of their history
within the past two or three thousand odd years, and American
civilization to the past fifteen hundred years. The matter is somewhat
greater than that--just as man is somewhat greater than a fool of
natural caprice.
There is one point from which this question of American origins, at
least of American place in human society and civilization, can be
studied in its broader lines, even with what materials we have. It is
that of language in general. All these other matters we have touched
upon are necessary factors in the question of human evolution, and the
position of America cannot be considered apart from them, and all of
them. But Language touches both the glyphs directly and also all these
other things, and is itself of surpassing interest and importance as a
human study.
* * * * *
From one point of view Language is man himself, and it certainly is
civilization. Without it man is not man, a Self-expressing and social
being. It is, as von Humboldt laid down, not an act but an activity, or
energy, not a thing done, but a doing. It is the constant effort of the
conscious self to formulate thought. It is the use of the energy of
creation, of objectivation, a veritable many-colored rainbow bridge
between the inner or higher man and the outer or lower worlds. And it is
not only the expression of Man as man, but in its varied forms it is the
inevitable and living expression of each man or body of men at any and
every point of time. Itself boundless as an ocean, it is in its infinite
forms and streams and colors and sounds, the faithful and exact exponent
both of the sources and channels by which it has come, and of the banks
in which it is held, racial, national or individual. It is living or
dead, forceful or weak, pure or foul, refreshing or flat, healing or
poisonous. It limits us, but yields to our force. Every word or form
comes to us with the thought impress of every man or nation that has
used or molded it before us. We must take it as it comes, but we give it
something of ourselves as we pass it on. If our intellectual and
spiritual thought is aflame, whether as nation or individual, we may
purify it, energize it, give it power to form and arrange the atoms
around it--and we have a new literature, a new and beneficent, creative
social vehicle of intercourse, mutual understanding, and human
unification. Or if our mental or spiritual life is stale, and petty, or
egoistic, or seeking for enjoyment only rather than action; if we have
nothing in us to give the words and forms we use, but only some national
force left to use and play with them, we for a while refine, and paint,
and pettify, and elaborate into meaningless subtleties of form, every
one of which in turn reacts upon our mental and spiritual life,
distracting and enchaining us, until at last the nation and its
language--die out; for neither can live without the other.
Now it is evident that the criterion of the perfectness of any language
is not to be found in a comparison of its forms or methods with those of
any other, but in its fitness as a vehicle for the expression of deeper
life, of the best and the greatest that is in those who use it, and
above all in its ability to react and stimulate newer and yet greater
mental and spiritual activity and expression. The force behind man,
demanding expression through him, and him only, into the human life of
all, is infinite--of necessity infinite. There is no limit, nor ever has
been any limit, to what man may bring down into the dignifying,
broadening and enriching of human life and evolution, save in his own
ability to comprehend, express, and _live_ it. And the brightness and
cleanness of the tools whereby he formulates his thought, as well as the
worthiness and fitness of the substance and the forms into which he
shapes it for others to see, are the essentials of his craft. For such
is the economy of nature, which wastes nothing in reality, that a fit
vehicle will be taken possession of by its own tenant; and the unfit
left to and be taken by those who can use no better.
Before, then, taking up the great formal classes into which language at
large is usually divided, it will be necessary to say a few words as to
the foundations of form itself in language, that we may then proceed to
consider these classes from the standpoint of their inner meaning rather
than solely of the outer form; and by seeking to understand the mental
and spiritual equipment and life of those that used them, may perhaps in
turn be better fitted finally to enter into the genius of their written
and spoken languages, and to interpret through them in the detail more
of the ideas which those forms were both fitted and used to express.
Such a method is essential for the understanding of any language or
culture, but it is absolutely necessary in the case of these non-Aryan
tongues, so great is the distance both of time and thought which
separates us from them. If we set out to compare the forms by which they
expressed their thought with those within which we develop ours, or
approach these cultures and peoples in the attitude of alien criticism,
study their "interesting ways" through a mental lorgnette and impale
their dead forms on the needles of our collection, we shall not only
show ourselves less broad in culture than many of them, but we shall
simply close and lock the doors of discrimination and understanding
before us. The question is not, How do their forms and ways appeal to
us? but, How did those forms, and ways, achieve their underlying
objects, and what was the _thought_ behind them?
Life is action, and without activity whatever powers lie within any
conscious being are only potential. Activity is the bridge between the
inner man and the outer world, by which he impresses his thought, in
forms, on chaos or the atoms about him, receiving in return increased
knowledge and experience of all he touches, and knowledge of himself
through the results of his own actions; and it is the bridge between man
and man. For this reason the verb, the word of action, is the most
important and most developed part of speech. The three hypostases of
life, as of language, are the self, activity, and the world; and it is
for the expression of all the possible varied relations between these
three, that all the forms of any language come into being. And from the
way in which these forms are developed, and the relative importance
which is given to this or that form of thought or activity, the
character of the people, their grasp of nature, and their own conception
of themselves and their relation to the world, can be seen.[49-*] Some
languages have the strong impress of impersonality, without any loss of
virility; others are strongly egotistic and self-assertive, with perhaps
the braggart's lack of genuine strength. Each spoken language that we
know has its own color and tone, to which our thought must respond, if
we would know and use it well. To speak good Swedish, for instance,
requires clear thinking to an exceptional degree. To show this, the form
"come here," which is the ordinary English expression, is simply _bad
grammar_ in Swedish; the use of "come _hither_" (_kom hit_, instead of
_kom haer_) is imperative. We have the "hither" in English, but it has
become stilted, and the linguistic distinction lost. Compare also the
use of _fa_, as a common auxiliary; nor are these exceptions, but, on
the contrary, characteristic examples. Also to enunciate the language
rightly one must hold the back and neck erect and the muscles firm.
In some languages the speaker thinks of himself and his completed action
as inseparable, as a single idea, as the Latin _edi_ for I have eaten;
in others he thinks of himself subconsciously as possessing the results
of his action, as our _I have eaten_; and in others, as among the Irish
peasantry, he separates himself and 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 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 development, accompany the imaginative processes of mind.
Or, since imagination to our literal thought implies in some degree the
fanciful (though wrongly so in essence), we might perhaps better say
that that form of writing is the fit attendant and exponent of those
functions of mind which cognize the inner meanings of the facts of life
directly, rather than those which study them through the correlation of
their phenomena. And also, that the development by any people of an
alphabetic out of a hieroglyphic system, does not imply a greater
advance in linguistic perfection on their part, but indicates a
corresponding mental and inner change of attitude towards ideas and
things, and a different conception of the self as related to them all.
It is not at all necessary to assume that the knowledge gained by one
method is deeper or more exact than the other. True science may exist as
fully under one set of circumstances as the other. If we will take the
type of the so-called most primitive form, the monosyllabic--the
Chinese, we shall find all this evidenced in the clearest manner. To
note but one illustration, a study of the scientific and philosophical
ideas involved in and conveyed by the word _k'ung_, for Space, ether,
the fundamental substratum of sound or vibration, as well as the
"interetheric" central point of balance and power, will disclose an
understanding that has nothing to fear from modern comparisons.
And the very fact that Chinese has had to depend on placement of its
monosyllables to express all the relations for which speech is called
upon, instead of relying on changes of form, seems to have, and indeed
has so stimulated the development of pure linguistic power that the
language is actually as perfect and clear a medium of cultured and
learned intercourse, as is the Sanskrit, the supreme type of the
so-called most developed form, the inflectional. And by reason of its
possession of the ideographic element it has a vividness which the
Sanskrit has not. No language can be a highly developed one which does
not provide in some way for the expression of all possible needed
relations between the three fundamental postulates of life and
activity--the self, the action and the world; and Chinese does this in
spite of its monosyllabic structure by the development of its syntax of
position. And it should be remembered further that Chinese syntax, in
strict correspondence to the genius of the language, is not the same
formal thing that syntax is with our inflectional tongues, but includes,
or rather is primarily based on the _harmonic adjustment of the inherent
basic ideas of or within the words_. The Chinese monosyllables are then
not the naked separate things they are in the dictionary, but the whole
phrase or sentence is on the contrary as much a unit as one of ours; and
often more so.
This integral unity of the whole sentence or expression, dominated by a
perspective of ideas rather than of forms, which is achieved in Chinese
by the elaboration of placement, is also characteristic of the structure
of the languages of the American continent; but, these languages being
polysyllabic, the vividness and unity are attained by a method described
as Incorporation, whereby the accessories of relation are so included in
or attached to the leading word that the whole expression assumes the
form and sound of a single word. And a similar process takes place with
the various elements of a compound sentence. So that although this one
of the divisions of language approaches very closely to the Inflectional
in its external forms, it yet has held to the vividness and essential
characteristics of the ideographic method. And it is a point of the
utmost importance for the decipherment of the Maya glyphs, to note as
has been stated before, that their syntax of combination must follow
that of the spoken language, which we know.
There is one broad line of division marking all the languages and
civilizations of the world--the line between the ideographic and the
literal; it marks the use of hieroglyphic or of alphabetic writing, and
it denotes a culture so widely different from ours, modes of thought so
distinct, views of life and man's relation to it one might almost say so
opposite to ours, as to point unmistakably to a most distant past, and a
former world-culture probably as wide-spread in its day as is now
ours--or more so. And it is one of the strangest and most remarkable of
the phenomena we are considering, that the two divisions have overlapped
each other in time to such a degree that whereas we have in Sanskrit,
the most perfect type of Aryan, or inflectional languages, the oldest of
them all; on the other hand we have in Chinese an equally perfect
linguistic medium of the other type, kept alive into our own times.
When we consider the development and status of the American
civilizations which have been revealed to us, and especially when we
have once opened our minds to the possibility that world-civilizations
different in their time from ours in ours, may for all we know have
existed and been blotted out ages ago, leaving linguistic traces, and
perhaps perpetuating cultural remnants in a few parts of the earth, it
is impossible not to recognize the breadth of the problem we are
considering. All over the American continent at the time of the
Discovery we see cultures and systems whose time had come. Back of most
of the North and South American tribes we find the remains of mighty and
utterly extinct civilizations--only their dim memory left. In the
centers of higher culture from Mexico to Peru we see the ancient
civilization brought further down to our own times; but there also, in
process, all the incidents of break-up and an expiring greatness.
Internecine strife, invasion from outside, changes of center, are all
going on, and all marked by a _steady decrease_ in everything that means
civilization. Of the ancient mathematical and astronomical knowledge a
corner of which is revealed to us by the Maya glyph remains, only a
distorted fragment appears in the Mexican, where also hieroglyphs have
yielded to a cruder rebus-writing. The stately and incomparable
compositions and architecture of Palenque, Copan and Quirigua have
yielded to the ball courts and local strifes of Chichen Itza--all this
following the very course of changing historical succession preserved in
the Chronicles. The later the date, the lower in every case the culture;
this is impossible not to recognize, nor have we traces of any different
course of events. Of course we see the rise of the Aztec nation, a small
cycle, but like the Gothic upon the Roman, it comes at the end of the
general American break-up--an incursion of barbarians settling on and
preserving for us fragments of the culture that preceded them, just as
has happened over and over again all over the world. And the same with
the Incas in Peru. And yet even the Mexican culture demands our high
respect, comparing favorably with European of the same period. Indeed it
was actually far ahead of the latter in matters of education and many
points of polity.
But in spite of its seeming greatness, its heart and energy were gone,
just as with Peru, and both yielded to what on the face seems a miracle,
but was only the expression of that force which was preparing the
American continent for a new race and civilization, still now only in
its beginnings. The Mayan empire had already broken up. And even as we
write, the archaeological history of the other hemisphere is being
repeated here; on the heels of Manabi comes the Chimu Valley, and soon
it will be with America as with Egypt--one will not be able to print an
up-to-date work on its early history, for new discoveries will carry it
back further, and to greater scope, before the previous ones can be
edited and gotten to press. Compare the few pages of earliest Egypt in
Sharpe's history, with Flinders Petrie's work of a decade or so ago, and
that with the situation today.
It is a simple fact that decipherment and publication all over the world
can no longer keep pace with discovery; and the time has come for
archaeology to begin to survey these remnants, engineering works that
would tax any modern nation with all our appliances, vast ruined
cities, one above the other, innumerable languages and writings, the
traces of peoples whose very names are lost to history--as a whole, and
to ask itself how long it must have taken for all these works to be
accomplished, let alone for the birth and decay of the civilizations
that supported them, and gave environment for the development of such
technical skill as could finish the enormous bulk of the Great Pyramid
with an accuracy beyond the fineness of our best instruments to measure.
For not only mere bulk is to be considered--though there is enough of
that scattered over the earth to keep all the possible available
craftsmen of the world a wholly incommensurate time achieving them, but
the ability to conceive and carry out such works. What _sort_ of people
leveled Monte Alban for its crown of pyramids, dreamed and executed the
stucco modelings of Palenque, built the temple of Boro Budur in Java,
cut the Bamian statues of the Hindu Kush, and so on, and so on, for page
after page? If they had such appliances as we have, they must be ranked
at least in our class for having them; if they did them without our
great engines, what sort of men were they? And if they could do these
things without our appliances, is it not a fair inference that they
could easily have made the tools, or others better perhaps?
One fact is becoming more prominent with every advance of archaeology
over the world, a fact of the greatest linguistic interest, namely that
ancient civilizations and empires, as a whole, _lasted longer_ than ours
of today. Consider how many different and successive empires Europe has
had in the last 2000 odd years, _our_ history; and how long each of our
cultures has lasted. All of them put together would go into one of these
older periods, and have plenty to spare. Passing over what may be the
real meaning and bearing of this fact on the problem of universal
history and human evolution, and the position of our race today, the
linguistic considerations which follow are most interesting.
If the fundamental thesis of language as a human activity is its direct
correspondence to and expression of all the inner motives and forces of
the users, we have here a key to the survival to our day, an unknown
period past its own time, of the Chinese type.
Of the development, modification and decay of languages we have ample
material in our own times for study, the periods over which the
modifying forces operate being an equal measure of the periods of
national activity and change. And, what is perhaps not always
sufficiently recognized, we have an elaboration of the formal elements
going on under very different impulses, at different periods of the life
of the language. The time has come in the history of a people for it to
play a greater part on the world's stage: some danger has threatened the
national life and aroused its energies, or other causes have worked to
quicken the mental and spiritual life; an Elizabethan era is ushered in,
frequently by a forerunner, a Chaucer, and the language responds, its
forms develop and are perfected. Or else some fitting or amalgamating
force comes in from outside, the life of the people is widened, new
blood enters in every sense, and the forms of the language respond. Or
perhaps, when they may seem to have come to the tether end of things,
and men's minds turn back to older, even prehistoric times, seeds long
buried and forgotten in the nature spring up, and a true national
Renaissance follows. In these cases the change and elaboration of forms
is a symptom of new life; the vehicle is being molded and expanded to
fit the growing thought.
But it is not always so. There comes a time when the outgoing force, the
activity of life, wanes and, after a greater or less period of settled
conditions, a period of proper use and government of the regions
occupied, a change sets in. And then we may have again the wholly
deceptive phenomenon of linguistic amplification; but it is the false
activity of decay. The energy has turned in and begun to feed upon
itself. 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 phases of linguistic and cultural activity, operative with
about the same degree of rapidity, all over both hemispheres, save in
places protected by our Law of Retardation. We will find the rate of
changes and successions generally far less rapid the farther back in
time we go; and finally we will find a special and marked acceleration
on both sides of the Atlantic during the last thousand years, all
incident to the placing of a new race in America.
So for the facts as we find them. They point to the descent of past
American civilizations from a past period of continental, or far more
probably, of world-wide extent. For who can imagine that people great
enough to build as these did, should not also have navigated? Why should
we assume in the face of other experiences, that Maya dates and
calculations mean nothing, except on the general principle that they did
not know as much as we do, and were doubtless liars? Bailly proved over
a hundred years ago that Hindu exact astronomical observations must date
back at least 5000 years, and that they were in possession of minutely
accurate tables[61-*] long before Europe was. And the rotundity of the
earth was certainly known both to them and the other great nations of
antiquity.
Archaeology is today pushing back the dates of fixed and acknowledged
history almost to the date given by the Egyptians to Solon for the
submersion of the great Atlantean island; and if we can but read the
Maya glyphs, and open _that_ door, another twenty years from now may
show us beyond all possible dispute evidences in every part of the earth
belt of a contemporaneous culture, different from and precedent to the
Aryan.
* * * * *
I have so far in this monograph, based upon and having to do as it has
with the Maya glyphs, their interpretation and their place in the
linguistic field, limited myself to an analysis and consideration of the
facts presented to us by those linguistic and cultural data we have
actually before us. But there is one further problem which is suggested
by it all. It is this: Where, in point of time and place, is the change
in the world's linguistic and cultural life from ideographic to literal
to be sought for, and what is its rationale? Separated from us by such
an enormous period of time as it is, I still cannot believe that some
view of it cannot be had. There are various facts of Old World history
and language, partly of prehistoric Europe, partly of Asia, an analysis
of which would extend this paper too far into other fields; but apart
entirely from the question of myths or traditions, there are various
actual observed phenomena both of language and writing, especially in
Central Asia, which do not fit into any of the ordinary theories, and
which do suggest this, as a simple linguistic conclusion. In point of
locality, at least, the conclusion agrees with the usual "Aryan home"
theory; but as far as concerns this latter it must be remembered that
however fully it demonstrates the unity of the Aryan race, beyond that
fact all questions of dates and even of the state of civilization at the
time, are not matters of history as yet for us, but only of theory--as
to which our present "perspective" may be once more as faulty as it has
often been heretofore.[62-*]
I believe that this center of transition lay somewhere in Central Asia,
to the north of the great Himalayan range. That this region was a sort
of alembic, a melting-pot (as America is today) for various peoples of
an ancient world-wide culture, as broad at least in its scope as the
term Aryan is today. That this culture displayed the ideographic traits
we have discussed, and that it has left more or less definite traces at
different places in the world. That it covered the two Americas, in
whatever continental form they may then have existed, leaving us there
"les debris echappes a un naufrage commun." That coincident with a new
and universal world-epoch, as wide in its cultural scope as the
difference between the ideographic and literal, there was finally formed
a totally new vehicle for the use of human thought, the inflectional,
literal, alphabetic. That this vehicle was perfected into some great
speech, the direct ancestor of Sanskrit, into the _forms_ of which were
concentrated all the old power of the ancient hieroglyphs and their
underlying concepts. For Sanskrit, while the oldest is also the
mightiest of Aryan grammars; and no one who has studied its forms, or
heard its speech from educated native mouths, can call it anything but
concentrated spiritual power. That the force which went on the one hand
into the Sanskrit forms, was on the other perpetuated on into the
special genius of Chinese, in which, as we know it, we have a retarded
survival, not of course of outer form so much as of method and essence.
And in Tibetan, in spite of all that is said to the contrary, I suspect
that we have a derivative, not from either Chinese or Sanskrit as we
know them, but by a medial line from a common point.[63-*] Of course
the time for such changes must have been enormous; but whatever it was,
it was no greater in its realm as time, than were the mental differences
in theirs. And they both are equally human data.
Certain other facts point to the American or Atlantic source and center
of this ancient epoch. They are briefly that all around the
Mediterranean basin we find traces of a vanished culture, unknown to our
history, and living only in tradition and some archaeological remains.
And of this culture various investigators, each approaching it from his
particular favorite locality, have constructed for us as many different
"Empires," by theories each supported by various details of analogies.
One calls them Tartars, another Hittites, another Pelasgians, and so on.
And all of them, in each of the theories, have as a fact a great many
unexplained characteristics, different from those of our historical
nations. Some of these characteristics, most markedly the Basque, but
also not a few at greater distance, have definite American similarities.
It might not be a far guess that these fragments represent an eastward
movement, which later in the history of the Aryan development met and
was pushed back westward again by the fully formed and dominant Aryan
race from its Central Asian center. This is the future province of
Archaeology.
* * * * *
And I am convinced that the widest door there is to be opened to this
past of the human race, is that of the Maya glyphs. The narrow
limitations of our mental horizon as to the greatness and dignity of
man, of his past, and of human evolution, were set back widely by Egypt
and what she has had to show, and again by the Sanskrit; but the walls
are still there, and advances, however rapid, are but gradual. With the
reading of America I believe the walls themselves will fall, and a new
conception of past history will come.