anything directly; in order to enter the living stream of such a language one must first recapitulate knowledge acquired by the study of history from a world that has died, and transport one’s self into an alien mode of thought. How superabundant must be the impulse of one’s own thinking, if it does not grow weary in this long and wide field of history and in the end modestly content itself with the region of history. If the thinking of the possessor of a living language does not become alive, he may rightly be accused of not having thought at all and of having merely indulged in reverie. The possessor of a dead language, however, cannot in a similar case be similarly accused without hesitation; it may be that he has “thought” after his own fashion, i.e., carefully developed the conceptions deposited in his language. Only he has not done that which, if he succeeded in doing it, would be accounted a miracle.
Incidentally it is evident that the impulse to thinking, in the case of a people with a dead language, will be most powerful and produce the greatest apparent results in the beginning, when the language has not yet become clear enough to everyone. It is also evident that, as soon as the language becomes clearer and more definite, this impulse to thinking will tend more and more to die away in the chains of the language. It is further evident that in the end the philosophy of a people of this kind will consciously resign itself to the fact that it is only an explanation of the dictionary, or, as un-German spirits among us have expressed it in a more high-sounding fashion, a metacritic of language; and, finally, that such a people will acknowledge some mediocre didactic poem in comedy form on the subject of hypocrisy to be its greatest philosophical work.[1]
