ould be such
as should convey to something in us behind the intellect just the
indefinable feeling either of these people give us.

In the Chinese writing, with all its difficulty, there is
something superior to our alphabets: an element that appeals to
the soul directly, or to the imagination directly, I think.
Suppose you found a Chinese ideogram--of course there is no such
a one--to express the forgotten Celtic culture; and it proved in
analysis, to be composed of the signs for twilight, wind, and
pine trees; or wind, night, and wild waters; with certain other
elements which not the brain-mind, but the creative soul, would
have to supply. In such a symbol there would be an appeal to the
imagination--that great Wizard within us--to rise up and supply
us with quantities of knowledge left unsaid. Indeed, I am but
trying to illustrate an idea, possibilities.... I think there is
a power within the human soul to trace back all growths, the most
profuse and complex, to the simple seed from which they sprung;
or, just as a single rose or pansy bloom is the resultant, the
expression, of the interaction and interplay of innumerable
forces--so the innumerable forces whose interaction makes the
history of one race, one culture, could find their ultimate
expression in a symbol as simple as a pansy or rose bloom--color,
form and fragrance. So each national great age would be a flower
evolved in the garden of the eternal; and once evolved, once
bloomed, it should never pass away; the actual blossom withers
and falls; but the color, the form, the fragrance,--these remain
in the world of causes. And just as you might press a flower in
an album, or make a painting of it, and preserve its scent by
chemical distillation or what not--and thereby preserve the
whole story of all the forces that went to the production of
that bloom--and they are, I suppose, in number beyond human
computation--so you might express the history of a race in a
symbol as simple as a bloom... And that there is a power, an
unfolding faculty, in the soul, which, seeing such a symbol,
could unravel from it, by meditation, the whole achievement of
the race; its whole history, down to details; yes, even down to
the lives of every soul that incarnated in it: their personal
lives, with all successes, failures, attempts, everything.
Because, for example, the light which comes down to us as that of
ancient Greece is the resultant, the remainder of all the forces