h Root-Race: is that to figure mainly on the
plane of intellect? Or shall we then take intellectual things
somewhat for granted, as having learnt them and passed on to
something higher? Look at those diagrams of the planes and globes
in _The Secret Doctrine,_ and see how the last ones, the sixth
and seventh, come to be on the same level as the first and
second. Shall we be passing, then, to a time when, in the
seventh, our languages will have no need for complexity: when
our ideas, no longer personal but universal and creative, will
flow easily from mind to mind, from heart to heart on a little
tone, a chanted breath of music; when mere billiard-balls of
syllables will serve us, so they be rightly sung:--until
presently with but seven pure vowel sounds, and seven tones to
sing them to, we shall be able to tell forth once more the whole
of the Glory of God?

Now then, is Chinese primitive, or is it an evolution far away
and ahead of us? Were there first of all billiard-balls; and
did they acquire a trick of coalescing and running together;
this one and that one, in the combination, becoming subordinate
to another; until soon you had a little wriggling creature of a
word, with his head of prefix, and his tail of suffix, to look or
flicker this way or that according to the direction in which he
wished to steer himself, the meaning to be expressed;--from
monosyllabic becoming agglutinative, synthetic, declensional,
complex--Alpine and super-Sanskrit in complexity;--then Pyrenean
by the wearing down of the storms and seasons; then Vosges, with
crags forest-covered; then green soft round Welsh mountains;
and then, still more and more worn down by time and the phonetic
laws which decree that men shall (in certain stages of their
growth) be always molding their languages to an easier and easier
pronunciation,--stem assimilating prefix and suffix, and growing
intolerant of changes within itself;--fitting itself to the
weather, rounding off its angles, coquetting with euphony;--
dropping harsh consonants; tending to end words with a vowel, or
with only the nasal liquids n and ng, softest and roundest sounds
there are;--till what had evolved from a billiard-ball to an
Alpine crag, had evolved back to a billiard-ball again, and was
Chinese? Is it primitive, or ultimate? I am almost certain of
this, at any rate: that as a language-type, it stands somewhere
midway between ours and spiritual speech.

How should that be; when