Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/99

 infinitely more value than the latter. All direct comparisons between German and neo-Latin languages are therefore null and void, and are obliged to discuss things which are not worth discussing. If the intrinsic value of the German language is to be discussed, at the very least a language of equal rank, a language equally primitive, as, for example, Greek, must enter the lists; but such a comparison is far beyond our present purpose.

56. What an immeasurable influence on the whole human development of a people the character of its language may have—its language, which accompanies the individual into the most secret depths of his mind in thought and will and either hinders him or gives him wings, which unites within its domain the whole mass of men who speak it into one single and common understanding, which is the true point of meeting and mingling for the world of the senses and the world of spirits, and fuses the ends of both in each other in such a fashion that it is impossible to tell to which of the two it belongs itself—how different the results of this influence may prove to be where the relation is as life to death, all this in general is easily perceived. In the first place, the German has a means of investigating his living language more thoroughly by comparing it with the closed Latin language, which differs very widely from his own in the development of verbal images; on the other hand, he has a means of understanding Latin more clearly in the same way. This is not possible to a member of the neo-Latin peoples, who fundamentally remains a captive in the sphere of one and the same language. Then the German, in learning the original Latin, at the same time acquires to a certain extent the derived languages also; and if he should learn the former more thoroughly than a foreigner does, which for the reason given the German will very likely