Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/93

 designated. At most, the result of this would be that the first generation of a people which thus changed its language would be compelled when adults to go back to the years of childhood; with their descendants, however, and with subsequent generations, everything would doubtless be in the old order again. On the other hand, this change has consequences of the greatest importance in respect of the supersensuous part of the language. For the first possessors of the language this part was formed in the way already described; but, for those who acquire the language later, the verbal image contains a comparison with an observation of the senses, which they have either passed over long ago without the accompanying mental development, or else have not yet had, and perhaps never can have. The most that they can do in such a case is to let the verbal image and its mental significance explain each other; in this way they receive the flat and dead history of a foreign culture, but not in any way a culture of their own. They get symbols which for them are neither immediately clear nor able to stimulate life, but which must seem to them entirely as arbitrary as the sensuous part of the language. For them this advent of history, and nothing but history, as expositor, makes the language dead and closed in respect of its whole sphere of imagery, and its continuous onward flow is broken off. Although, beyond this sphere, they may again develop the language as a living language in their own way and so far as this is possible from such a starting-point, nevertheless that element remains a dividing wall at which, without exception, language in its original emergence from life as a force of nature and the actual language’s renewal of contact with life are broken. Although such a language may be stirred on the surface by the wind of life and thus present the appearance of