Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/450

420 the mind within the syllabic signs. The fact of such an invention may help to explain the failure of the Chinese to reach this final stage. But ideographic changes go on to a great extent, notwithstanding printing. The original figure gradually becomes effaced; just as words lose their primitive interjectional or mimetic forms, and pass into more or less conventional syllables, whose origin is inscrutable without deep historical research. Thus the Egyptian hieroglyph became first a hieratic, then a demotic or cursive script, the former being simply its characteristic part used for the whole, and the latter a still more radical transformation for rapid writing; and these changes took place in remote ages. The Chinese cursive is analogous to the Egyptian hieratic, and, though much more complicated, sometimes even more fully effaces the rude ideograph than either of the later Egyptian styles efface the more elegant hieroglyph. The cuneiform writing is in a style analogous to the latest Chinese stage, but so utterly non-ideographic in form that, but for the recent discovery of some of the original picture-signs side by side with the nail-like images of them, it would not be believed that the latter could have originated in this way. The time and manner of the change lie far back in some unrecorded mystery of human demand and supply.

Can be studied in the Chinese signs.

Chinese ideography, on the other hand, can be studied in all its phases: so distinctly has the national genius for graphic art expressed itself, and so little has it been checked, even by printing, in the transformation of its instruments. The living language, too, with its literary treasures, makes all stages of past construction an open book. And we are spared the long series of patient and minute studies which the genius of Champollion and