Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/531

Rh cursive hand,—that each Hiragana syllabic letter has several alternative forms, that there is no means of indicating capitals or punctuation, that all the words are run together on a page without any mark to show where one leaves off and another begins,—and the result is the most complicated system of writing ever evolved upon this planet. An old Jesuit missionary declares it to be evidently "the invention of a conciliabule of the demons, to harass the faithful." At the same time, it must be owned that the individuals thus diabolically harassed are principally those foreigners who make their first attempt on the language when already of adult age. The often-repeated assertion that the ideographs waste years of school life is simply not true:—the Japanese lad of fifteen is abreast of his English contemporary in every way. The Japanese navvy makes as good a show at spelling out the newspaper or inditing a letter as the English navvy. After all, the average Englishman is not only abreast, but actually ahead, of the average Italian in reading and writing, notwithstanding that Italian orthography could be mastered in a day, whereas our own, in all its ramifications, might occupy a lifetime. The fact seems to be that, at a certain age, the mind will absorb any system of written symbols equally well. A large number can, practically, be learnt in the same time as a small number, just as a net with many meshes can be taken in by the eye as easily as a net with few. The same holds good of spoken symbols. Any language is assimilated equally well in early childhood,—a complex inflectional language in precisely the same time as a simple monosyllabic one. Nay more: place a child under favourable conditions, for instance, in an English family living in France and employing German governesses or tutors, and he will absorb all three languages in the same time, with the same ease, and with the same perfection as a single one would have taken had he remained in his native village. Evidently, there exists a whole educational domain to which arithmetical reasoning does not apply.