nomenal world, and the validity of its familiar interests, sentiments, and pursuits.
Relation of abstract to concrete in the Chinese Mind.
It would be quite wrong to infer from facts like these that we are dealing with pure materialists. Their significance may be better stated by saying that the Chinese do not hold ideas apart from concrete embodiment, so as to study them in their own right, and in their capacity for growth. As the Hindu could not easily get away from the abstract Idea, so the Chinese cannot get away from the embodied Form. This is perfectly illustrated in the written characters of their language. There is an immediateness of relation between idea and embodiment, abstract and concrete, in their mental constitution, which has not only forced each primary complex of experience directly into the mould of a single syllabic sound, and thence into the still more concrete shape of a visible written image, but has held it fast bound on this material plane. So that not only has sound failed to be analyzed into alphabetic elements, but the inner development of the idea itself, arrested at the outset, has remained unaccomplished, — the mind being busied, not in pursuing its lead, but in constant effort to modify and perfect its visible sign. The paucity of ideas in Chinese civilization, the intellectual rigidity, the comparative absence of historical development, have long been suspected to be somehow owing to the too rapid crystallization of thought into written and even printed forms. Spoken language, as an intermediate stage in this process, has, in fact, received much less attention than written. Little effort has been made to bring the dialects of the Middle Kingdom into a common speech, compared with that expended on the grand achievement of a common script conveying the same meaning to the hundreds of millions of its population. Less than five-hundred sounds have been invented; and these have been made by very primitive artifices of tone,
