syllables without any element in common.

The evolution of language, then, on this view, may be regarded as a
movement out of, and away from, the holophrastic in the direction of
the analytic. When every piece in your play-box of verbal bricks can
be dealt with separately, because it is not joined on in all sorts
of ways to the other pieces, then only can you compose new constructions
to your liking. Order and emphasis, as is shown by English, and still
more conspicuously by Chinese, suffice for sentence-building. Ideally,
words should be individual and atomic. Every modification they suffer
by internal change of sound, or by having prefixes or suffixes tacked
on to them, involves a curtailment of their free use and a sacrifice
of distinctness. It is quite easy, of course, to think confusedly,
even whilst employing the clearest type of language; though in such
a case it is very hard to do so without being quickly brought to book.
On the other hand, it is not feasible to attain to a high degree of
clear thinking, when the only method of speech available is one that
tends towards wordlessness--that is to say, is relatively deficient
in verbal forms that preserve their identity in all contexts. Wordless
thinking is not in the strictest sense impossible; but its somewhat
restricted opportunities lie almost wholly on the farther side, as
it were, of a clean-cut vocabulary. For the very fact that the words
are crystallized into permanent shape invests them with a suggestion
of interrupted continuity, an overtone of un-utilized significance,
that of itself invites the mind to play with the corresponding fringe
of meaning attaching to the concepts that the words embody.

It would prove an endless task if I were to try here to illustrate
at all extensively the stickiness, as one might almost call it, of
primitive modes of speech. Person, number, case, tense, mood and
gender--all these, even in the relatively analytical phraseology of
the most cultured peoples, are apt to impress themselves on the very
body of the words of which they qualify the sense. But the meagre list
of determinations thus produced in an evolved type of language can
yield one no idea of the vast medley of complicated forms that serve
the same ends at the lower levels of human experience. Moreover, there
are many other shades of secondary and circumstantial meaning which
in advanced languages are invariably represented by distinct words,
so that when not wan