Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/94

 having a life of its own, nevertheless it has a dead element deeper down, and by the entrance of the new circle of observation and the breach with the old one it is cut off from the living root.

53. We proceed to illustrate the foregoing by an example, remarking incidentally that such a language, at bottom dead and incomprehensible, very easily lends itself to perversion and to misuse in glossing over every kind of human corruption, and that this is not possible in a language which has never died. I take as my example the three notorious words, Humanity, Popularity, and Liberality. When these words are used in speaking to a German who has learnt no language but his own they are to him nothing but a meaningless noise, which has no relationship of sound to remind him of anything he knows already and so takes him completely out of his circle of observation and beyond any observation possible to him. Now, if the unknown word nevertheless attracts his attention by its foreign, distinguished, and euphonious tone, and if he thinks that what sounds so lofty must also have some lofty meaning, he must have this meaning explained to him from the very beginning and as something entirely new to him, and he can only accept this explanation blindly. So he becomes tacitly accustomed to acknowledge as really existing and valuable something which, if left to himself, he would perhaps never have found worth mentioning. Let no one believe that the case is much different with the neo-Latin peoples, who utter those words as if they were words of their mother-tongue. Without a scholarly study of antiquity and of its actual language they understand the roots of those words just as little as the German does. Now if, instead of the word Humanity [Humanität], we had said to a German the word Menschlichkeit,