ges is the
same--the intuitive _science_ of experience. It is the manifest form
that is never twice the same, for this form, which we call linguistic
morphology, is nothing more nor less than a collective _art_ of thought,
an art denuded of the irrelevancies of individual sentiment. At last
analysis, then, language can no more flow from race as such than can the
sonnet form.

Nor can I believe that culture and language are in any true sense
causally related. Culture may be defined as _what_ a society does and
thinks. Language is a particular _how_ of thought. It is difficult to
see what particular causal relations may be expected to subsist between
a selected inventory of experience (culture, a significant selection
made by society) and the particular manner in which the society
expresses all experience. The drift of culture, another way of saying
history, is a complex series of changes in society's selected
inventory--additions, losses, changes of emphasis and relation. The
drift of language is not properly concerned with changes of content at
all, merely with changes in formal expression. It is possible, in
thought, to change every sound, word, and concrete concept of a language
without changing its inner actuality in the least, just as one can pour
into a fixed mold water or plaster or molten gold. If it can be shown
that culture has an innate form, a series of contours, quite apart from
subject-matter of any description whatsoever, we have a something in
culture that may serve as a term of comparison with and possibly a
means of relating it to language. But until such purely formal patterns
of culture are discovered and laid bare, we shall do well to hold the
drifts of language and of culture to be non-comparable and unrelated
processes. From this it follows that all attempts to connect particular
types of linguistic morphology with certain correlated stages of
cultural development are vain. Rightly understood, such correlations are
rubbish. The merest _coup d'oeil_ verifies our theoretical argument on
this point. Both simple and complex types of language of an indefinite
number of varieties may be found spoken at any desired level of cultural
advance. When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the
Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.

It goes without saying that the mere content of language is intimately
related to culture. A society that has no knowledge of theosophy need