st instance. If "a man falls" but "men fall" in English, it is not
because of any inherent change that has taken place in the nature of the
action or because the idea of plurality inherent in "men" must, in the
very nature of ideas, relate itself also to the action performed by
these men. What we are doing in these sentences is what most languages,
in greater or less degree and in a hundred varying ways, are in the
habit of doing--throwing a bold bridge between the two basically
distinct types of concept, the concrete and the abstractly relational,
infecting the latter, as it were, with the color and grossness of the
former. By a certain violence of metaphor the material concept is forced
to do duty for (or intertwine itself with) the strictly relational.

The case is even more obvious if we take gender as our text. In the two
English phrases, "The white woman that comes" and "The white men that
come," we are not reminded that gender, as well as number, may be
elevated into a secondary relational concept. It would seem a little
far-fetched to make of masculinity and femininity, crassly material,
philosophically accidental concepts that they are, a means of relating
quality and person, person and action, nor would it easily occur to us,
if we had not studied the classics, that it was anything but absurd to
inject into two such highly attenuated relational concepts as are
expressed by "the" and "that" the combined notions of number and sex.
Yet all this, and more, happens in Latin. _Illa alba femina quae venit_
and _illi albi homines qui veniunt_, conceptually translated, amount to
this: _that_-one-feminine-doer[57] one-feminine-_white_-doer
feminine-doing-one-_woman_ _which_-one-feminine-doer
other[58]-one-now-_come_; and: _that_-several-masculine-doer
several-masculine-_white_-doer masculine-doing-several-_man_
_which_-several-masculine-doer other-several-now-_come_. Each word
involves no less than four concepts, a radical concept (either properly
concrete--_white_, _man_, _woman_, _come_--or demonstrative--_that_,
_which_) and three relational concepts, selected from the categories of
case, number, gender, person, and tense. Logically, only case[59] (the
relation of _woman_ or _men_ to a following verb, of _which_ to its
antecedent, of _that_ and _white_ to _woman_ or _men_, and of _which_ to
_come_) imperatively demands expression, and that only in connection
with the concepts directly affected (there is, for instance,