Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/103

 for constructing words. It is, in fact, a repertoire of forty thousand monosyllables each of which has its exact significance. These syllables may be used singly, or combined two, three, four, or five at a time, so as to convey every conceivable idea, however complex, delicate, or abstruse. The genius of man has never invented any machinery so perfect for converting thoughts into sounds. Possessors of an alphabet may denounce the ideograph as a clumsy, semi-civilised form of writing, and may accuse it of developing the mechanics of memory at the expense of the intellectual faculty. But the Chinese ideographist can oppose to such criticism the answer that as a vehicle for rendering the products of the mind the ideograph is without rival, and that, while the Anglo-Saxon has to devise a vocabulary for his scientific and philosophical developments by the halting aid of dead languages, exact equivalents for every new conception can be coined readily by the unassisted ideographic mint. The chronological sequence of this retrospect may be anticipated so far as to say that it was owing to the possession of such mechanism that the Japanese scholar found no serious difficulty in fitting an accurate terminology to the multitude of novel ideas presented to him by Western civilisation in the nineteenth century, just as it would scarcely have been possible for him to assimilate the ethics of Confucianism and the civilisation of China fifteen centuries earlier,