Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex Part 4

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, Hitt.i.tes, 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 surpa.s.sing 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, refres.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.s 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses 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 att.i.tude 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-a.s.sertive, 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 har_) is imperative. We have the "hither" in English, but it has become stilted, and the linguistic distinction lost. Compare also the use of _f_, 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 relationtions.h.i.+p[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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses 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 [Ill.u.s.tration: 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 advent.i.tious; the relation of the idea to the spelled word is equally advent.i.tious. 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 att.i.tude towards ideas and things, and a different conception of the self as related to them all.

It is not at all necessary to a.s.sume 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 circ.u.mstances 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 ill.u.s.tration, a study of the scientific and philosophical ideas involved in and conveyed by the word _k'ung_, for s.p.a.ce, 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 a.s.sumes 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 cla.s.s 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. Pa.s.sing 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, cla.s.s, locality, and so on, but there are here and there cases of out and out exception--which from all we can see must be a.s.signed 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 r.e.t.a.r.dation, whose ultimate causes we cannot fathom or cla.s.sify, 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 r.e.t.a.r.dation. 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 a.s.sume 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 r.e.t.a.r.ded 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 a.n.a.logies.

One calls them Tartars, another Hitt.i.tes, 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[41-*] See _Memoranda on the Chilam Balam Calendars_, C. P. Bowditch, 1901. The obscurities of the Chronicles render the questions connected with Ahpula's death exceedingly difficult. For instance, the immediate context in the books of Mani and Tizimin make the date 1536, as given in numerals, an impossible one. But, if the date as given in _Maya terms_ is to be accepted at all (and it certainly is too specific to be rejected), then by the long count such a date _must_ have been either 1502, 5350, or 12,786 years after the date of Stela 9, Copan. Mr.

Bowditch favors the lower figure, chiefly because it is the lower, and thus puts Stela 9 at A. D. 34. To get this date the longest possible distance from Ahpula's death to the end of the katun must be used--that is, "6 tuns short" must be taken to mean "almost 7 tuns short." I can only say here that if, in correcting the figures 1536, as demanded by the immediate context, we make the simplest possible correction, and put them one katun earlier, 1516, and then take as the unexpired time to the end of the katun the shortest of the three terms given as possible, or 5 tuns 139 days, bringing the end of Katun 13-Ahau on Jan. 28, 1522, we not only bring the end of Katun 11-Ahau within the year 1541, as is most positively stated by the practically contemporary Pech Chronicle, but we also bring in line nearly all the important events of the Chronicles, from the fall of Mayapan, ca. 1450, the coming of the Spaniards, and the smallpox, in 11-Ahau (1521 to 1541), the conversion to Christianity in 9-Ahau, down to Landa's death (1579) in 7-Ahau; as well as many outside references. Any other combination requires harsher emendations somewhere else. But the above choice of the term of 5 tuns 139 days, thus seemingly called for, means that Stela 9 at Copan is dated, by the long count, 5350 years before Ahpula's death, or B. C. 3824. Whether this is right, is a question for the future.

[42-*] "In ethnology however one troubles oneself little with the detail of linguistic structure. It is held quite sufficient to gather from different peoples and collate a couple of hundred vocables, into whose actual nature all insight is lacking, and then upon dubious, often purely superficial and apparent similarities, to deduce linguistic affinities. Or else, as is now most in fas.h.i.+on, the claims of linguistic research towards the solution of ethnological questions are reduced to a 'most modest share' in comparison with other fields 'somewhat more in line with natural sciences'--meanwhile pointing for justification to the absurdities set forth as the results of too far-fetched linguistic deductions.... The errors and sophistries charged against ethnological linguistics are rather an accidental result of the individuality of single investigators, than essential to the subject. They are at least scarcely greater than those to the credit of recent Anthropometry. A brief glance at the strange changes of opinion in the latter field during the last three decades, in spite of all its boasted figures, shows how little ground it has to throw stones. Serious students, such as Wallace and Dall, whose critical ability in Zoomorphology no one can deny, and who do not rest content with a few skulls of doubtful _provenance_, gathered a la Hagenbeck, have come to a wholly negative view of the value of Craniometry."--Dr. Otto Stoll, _Maya-Sprachen der Pokom-Gruppe_, I, vii, ix.

[43-*] Our present day speculators never seem to think for a moment that these things may conceal, _and thereby preserve_, some real meaning, or be more than nonsense. The theory of mythological interpretation pushed to such extremes as in the "animistic" _explanations_ of Weber, Keightley, and others, and not absent from the writings of some Americanists (namely, that it was all nothing but ridiculous or concocted fancy, taken soberly) is bad enough, and argues little breadth or insight, when applied to the myths of a single people, considered alone. Applied to comparative mythology, in the state of things today, it is simply impossible. The plain fact is, that such ident.i.ties as these must indicate one of two things: a common tradition, locally modified by circ.u.mstances; or a _fact in nature_ or _history_, symbolically expressed in different ways according to the times and modes. And it most probably indicates both of these. It is indeed hard to account for the extent, and the weight given to some of these "myths," now that we are coming to a better appreciation of the scope and greatness of ancient civilizations--everywhere--except they do correspond to actual _facts_ in nature and history. And it might be worth our while to get at some of these.

[45-*] We might just as well acknowledge, once for all, that in spite of its present-day currency in England and America, and its pre-emption of the field of "science for the people," the theory of man's physical and mental descent from the anthropoids, is not only _not proved_, but is vehemently denied by an equally able and scientific, and withal more logical, body of researchers than those who form its supporters. To _fabricate_ a missing link in a chain (or even, as with Haeckel, several links), whose only authority is acknowledged to be its necessity in order to complete the evidence for the theory, and then to declare the theory proved because the fabricated link fits perfectly the gap it was created for, is equally vicious scientifically whether the fabrication be the work of a physicist of renown or a linguistic theorizer. Let it simply be agreed, as it now is by all science, that the _evolution of form_ is a universal and well evidenced principle, working out through the various well established and comprehensible incidents, such as natural selection, adaptation to environment, and so on--yet this statement of the fact is not an explanation of its cause. And every scientific and logical requirement will be equally, and better, met by regarding all forms, whether physical, linguistic, or of any kind, as coming, or rather brought, into being by the force of a consciousness which needs them as the vehicles of its expanding activity. That this is absolutely true in language, anybody can see. That it is true in every department of daily life about us, everybody _does_ see. That it should be equally true in biology and physics, would not affect the standing or verity of a single _observed_ fact.

There was, along about the beginning of the Christian era, and for some time before and after, a very curious movement, which seemed to spread itself over nearly the entire world, east and west. It is told of the early Aztecs that "they destroyed the records of their predecessors, in order to increase their own prestige." It is related that writing once existed in Peru, but was entirely wiped out, and the Inca records committed to quipus alone. The "burning of the books" under Tsin Chi Hw.a.n.gti in B. C. 213 sought to do the same for China. The times of Akbar witnessed much of the same in India. And in Europe almost nothing was left to tell the tale of the great pre-Christian eastern empires and systems of thought; so that from the establishment of State Christianity under Constantine, and the final settlement of the Canon at the Council of Nicaea, an impenetrable veil was drawn over the achievements and greatness of the Past, and all connexion therewith broken off. It was some time after this that we find the heliocentric theory, as well as that of other habitable worlds, denied (in Europe), because "it would deprive the Earth of its unique and central eminence." Just as we also today are served up with prehistoric savage and animal ancestors, to the greater glory of our own present-day magnificence. But it really is in sober truth only a question of mental perspective which does not affect the facts of history, biology, archaeology or language in the least. It is only a question of which end of the telescope we look through.

[49-*] It is exceedingly interesting to trace the course of criticism since the appearance of Wilhelm von Humboldt's great work, _Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts_ (Berlin, 1836). Dr.

Brinton gave it most unqualified approval; (see especially his monograph read before the American Philosophical Society in 1885, and printed the same year). Prof. H. Steinthal (_Grammatik, Logik und Psychologie_, 1855) calls the subject of "inner form" the most important one in linguistic science, and von Humboldt's treatment of it his greatest contribution to that science. And so on. But the work has nevertheless received little attention from a large number of writers, most of them declaring it "unclear." These two views, when one studies the various writers, seem to follow closely upon the standpoints from which each approaches the study. Those who study language (perhaps one should here say, languages) as a phenomenon, a set of external forms, an act, a thing done, get little use out of von Humboldt's work. Those who see it as a human "activity," an energy, get much. This is quite apparent in one of the clearest and ablest linguistic works which has recently appeared, Dr. Adolf Noreen's _Vrt Sprk_ (in 9 vols., still in course of publication, Lund, 1903 and later), a work of far wider linguistic value than appears from its t.i.tle. Dr. Noreen, however, dismisses von Humboldt's work, and the subject of "inner form," with a few pages, and the results are apparent in several interesting points. In the first place, in the course of an acute and critical a.n.a.lysis, wherein he shows that the purpose of speech is not simply _expression_ of thoughts or ideas, but the communication to some other person of the _knowledge_ of the ideas so held by the speaker, he goes on to say: "the same knowledge of A's wishes could be as well communicated by his saying 'I want you to come' as by his saying just 'Come.'" This is quite true; but the _energic_ effect is quite different. Language is the bridge from man to man, and it is also a _creative activity_ of man. Of course Dr. Noreen, in a later volume, where he most lucidly a.n.a.lyses the terms 'words,'

'forms,' and 'concepts,' etc. (_ord_, _morfem_, _semem_, etc.), and corrects many errors of definition made by his predecessors, acknowledges the difference between the two forms; still his whole admirable work, a.n.a.lytical and critical as it is, is devoted to this phase of language as a mere phenomenon, a set of forms which serve as a medium of communication. From this standpoint, we know all there is to know about language when we have cla.s.sified its forms. But from the other, the study is ever leading us into the regions and depths of man's consciousness, his creative activity as it goes out to the world; and the true definition of language, from this position, "can hence only be a genetic one." (von Humboldt, _Gesammelte Werke_, VI, 42)

It is further not unworthy of note that, except where directly required in treating of verbal categories, nearly all of the enormous number of ill.u.s.trations which Dr. Noreen chooses for his points, are _nouns_, names of _things_, and vary rarely verbal forms, words of action and _doing_. But it is simply a fact that all the _potency_ of language is in the verb, and almost all there is of language, in a philosophic sense, lies there. The verb is the bridge of communication and action _upon_ external things, just as is language itself, going out of man.