Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/449

Rh Of course the number of names suited for acrological use renders the choice somewhat arbitrary. It is

here that writing begins to be conventional rather than organic, and so falls into the position of a ready servant to thought, instead of a controlling mould for it. The estimate of the pictures as natural copies of things must have become measurably lost before the purely conventional signs we call alphabets got constructed arbi- trarily for linguistic purposes, without regard to imitation. Here the way opens for inventors, and alphabets have in fact been constructed for semi-civilized tribes by ingenious men. But this has usually been for a specific purpose. The formation of an alphabet without use of pre-existing forms must be rarer still, and its propagation extremely difficult. Ordinarily the alphabet is evolved from picture- signs. The primer tells their acrological secret : "A is an apple," &c.

The whole art of writing is thus a continuous evolution, every stage of which as mystery of progress involves an upward, ideal attraction, — from the first tattooing or cut- ting of the human skin, to these fine products of analysis, the alphabets of civilized thought. As the phonetic stage continues in combination with the picture-signs, so it laps over into the alphabetic, as for a long period in Egypt ; but the tendency is for the latter to supplant it, as its perfected form.

Whether that step in analysis, of which alphabets are the result, is taken or not, the ideographs themselves

do not fail of development under the shaping hands of convenience or beauty. This can be checked only by an invention like that of printing, which would also tend to prevent the formation of a pure alphabet by holding fast