swer it
intelligently. I can only very briefly set forth my own views, or rather
my general attitude. It would be very difficult to prove that
"temperament", the general emotional disposition of a people[192], is
basically responsible for the slant and drift of a culture, however much
it may manifest itself in an individual's handling of the elements of
that culture. But granted that temperament has a certain value for the
shaping of culture, difficult though it be to say just how, it does not
follow that it has the same value for the shaping of language. It is
impossible to show that the form of a language has the slightest
connection with national temperament. Its line of variation, its drift,
runs inexorably in the channel ordained for it by its historic
antecedents; it is as regardless of the feelings and sentiments of its
speakers as is the course of a river of the atmospheric humors of the
landscape. I am convinced that it is futile to look in linguistic
structure for differences corresponding to the temperamental variations
which are supposed to be correlated with race. In this connection it is
well to remember that the emotional aspect of our psychic life is but
meagerly expressed in the build of language[193].

[Footnote 192: "Temperament" is a difficult term to work with. A great
deal of what is loosely charged to national "temperament" is really
nothing but customary behavior, the effect of traditional ideals of
conduct. In a culture, for instance, that does not look kindly upon
demonstrativeness, the natural tendency to the display of emotion
becomes more than normally inhibited. It would be quite misleading to
argue from the customary inhibition, a cultural fact, to the native
temperament. But ordinarily we can get at human conduct only as it is
culturally modified. Temperament in the raw is a highly elusive thing.]

[Footnote 193: See pages 39, 40.]

[Transcriber's note: Footnote 193 refers to the paragraph beginning on
line 1256.]

Language and our thought-grooves are inextricably interwoven, are, in a
sense, one and the same. As there is nothing to show that there are
significant racial differences in the fundamental conformation of
thought, it follows that the infinite variability of linguistic form,
another name for the infinite variability of the actual process of
thought, cannot be an index of such significant racial differences. This
is only apparently a paradox. The latent content of all langua