William Gates

“ Had we nothing but the Perez Codex and Stela P at Copan, the merits of their execution alone, weighed simply in comparison with observed history elsewhere, would prove that we have to do not with the traces of an ephemeral, but with the remains of a wide-spread, settled race and civilization, worthy to be ranked with or beyond even such as the Roman, in its endurance, development and influence in the world, and the beginnings of whose culture are still totally unknown. ”

“ Now it is evident that the criterion of the perfectness of any language is not to be found in a comparison of its forms or methods with those of any other, but in its fitness as a vehicle for the expression of deeper life, of the best and the greatest that is in those who use it, and above all in its ability to react and stimulate newer and yet greater mental and spiritual activity and expression. The force behind man, demanding expression through him, and him only, into the human life of all, is infinite—of necessity infinite. ”

“ Activity is the bridge between the inner man and the outer world, by which he impresses his thought, in forms, on chaos or the atoms about him, receiving in return increased knowledge and experience of all he touches, and knowledge of himself through the results of his own actions; and it is the bridge between man and man. For this reason the verb, the word of action, is the most important and most developed part of speech. The three hypostases of life, as of language, are the self, activity, and the world ”

“ But the theory does not work out in practical application to the facts we have to deal with, for while we cannot find still left in the world any agglutinative languages representative of sufficient culture to bring into our present consideration, we do find a monosyllabic in the highest rank, and meeting the highest cultural requirements. In short, the latter may be theoretically the inferior tool, but the genius of thought behind is greater than the form. One man can draw a masterpiece with a burnt stick, another only paint a daub with all the brushes made. ”

“ But Language touches both the glyphs directly and also all these other things, and is itself of surpassing interest and importance as a human study.
From one point of view Language is man himself, and it certainly is civilization. Without it man is not man, a Self-expressing and social being. It is, as von Humboldt laid down, not an act but an activity, or energy, not a thing done, but a doing. It is the constant effort of the conscious self to formulate thought. ”

“ There comes a time when the outgoing force, the activity of life, wanes and, after a greater or less period of settled conditions, a period of proper use and government of the regions occupied, a change sets in. And then we may have again the wholly deceptive phenomenon of linguistic amplification; but it is the false activity of decay. The energy has turned in and begun to feed upon itself. The national impulse has changed from achievement to gratification, more and more sources are drawn upon to minister to its enjoyment, and that enjoyment becomes an art ”

“ And the moment we draw this line as an exponent of the mental and spiritual thought-life of the different peoples, we shall find it not only molding their language forms, both written and spoken, but manifest as well in their art, philosophy, and even their social polity. And of course we must be fair in our comparisons, and not set a Chinese coolie in the concrete against an English statesman, nor any concrete example of another kind of culture in its decay with the highest bloom to which we believe our own type to be able to carry us. ”

“ And yet every observed fact shows us savage or worn-out races everywhere throughout the world deteriorating and dying out, and nowhere any savages progressing or, unaided by outside influence, developing what we know as civilization. We see everywhere the rise and fall of nations, races and civilizations, and their utter blotting out; and we refuse to accept that process as a universal law through which the destiny of the human race is working itself out. In fact, we do not seem to believe that the human race has any destiny ”

“ One man sees directly the meaning of the things, the events and situations before him; another reasons it all out. And contrary to many of our current beliefs, the former is often the man of action; he sees at a flash to the heart of the matter, and gets things done. His thought, his activity, is vivid; and his words are likely to be so as well. The idealist, if he be broadminded, and not merely sentimental, is indeed likely to be the practical man. ”

“ Of course it is impossible to derive the American races or civilizations from the Chinese, Phoenicians, Hittites, or any of the cultures of the other hemisphere, if we limit the latter to what we know of their history within the past two or three thousand odd years, and American civilization to the past fifteen hundred years. The matter is somewhat greater than that—just as man is somewhat greater than a fool of natural caprice. ”

“ There is no limit, nor ever has been any limit, to what man may bring down into the dignifying, broadening and enriching of human life and evolution, save in his own ability to comprehend, express, and live it. ”

“ And every scientific and logical requirement will be equally, and better, met by regarding all forms, whether physical, linguistic, or of any kind, as coming, or rather brought, into being by the force of a consciousness which needs them as the vehicles of its expanding activity. That this is absolutely true in language, anybody can see. That it is true in every department of daily life about us, everybody does see. That it should be equally true in biology and physics, would not affect the standing or verity of a single observed fact. ”

“ Or if our mental or spiritual life is stale, and petty, or egoistic, or seeking for enjoyment [48] only rather than action; if we have nothing in us to give the words and forms we use, but only some national force left to use and play with them, we for a while refine, and paint, and pettify, and elaborate into meaningless subtleties of form, every one of which in turn reacts upon our mental and spiritual life, distracting and enchaining us, until at last the nation and its language—die out; for neither can live without the other. ”

“ The time has come in the history of a people for it to play a greater part on the world’s stage: some danger has threatened the national life and aroused its energies, or other causes have worked to quicken the mental and spiritual life; an Elizabethan era is ushered in, frequently by a forerunner, a Chaucer, and the language responds, its forms develop and are perfected. ”

“ If our intellectual and spiritual thought is aflame, whether as nation or individual, we may purify it, energize it, give it power to form and arrange the atoms around it—and we have a new literature, a new and beneficent, creative social vehicle of intercourse, mutual understanding, and human unification. ”

“ When we consider the development and status of the American civilizations which have been revealed to us, and especially when we have once opened our minds to the possibility that world-civilizations different in their time from ours in ours, may for all we know have existed and been blotted out ages ago, leaving linguistic traces, and perhaps perpetuating cultural remnants in a few parts of the earth, it is impossible not to recognize the breadth of the problem we are considering. ”

“ Coming then to the question of the subject-matter of the Codex, I feel that little is in order beyond a simple analytical description of the different pages, rather than any attempt at an interpretation. The road of general deductions from superficial resemblances between unknown elements and the details of other known things from other times and places, is strewn by the wrecks of too many theories to be attractive traveling. I am firmly convinced of the greatness and importance of the study we have before us, and the exalted civilization which produced it ”

“ And this is then the very period when all these material, formal elements are pointed to with pride as the evidence of culture and progress. The thought-life of the nation has lost itself in the conflict and confusion, in the distractions of the forms into which it has molded the matter its creative force had entered.
We have thus in nations and languages, as in individuals, the phenomena of birth, growth, use, and a quick or a slow death, all marked by various degrees and signs of health or disease, and every one at root a moral question. ”

“ When we meet them in sufficient numbers, we make new tables to cover them as far as we can, again in general only. Other causes still elude us, though they must have a fountain somewhere.
We have, as great exceptions to our general averages, two opposite phenomena. One is the sudden inexplicable and dazzling rise on the world’s stage of a totally insignificant people, the other the seeming arrest for long periods of time of the normal processes of even incipient decay. ”

“ Archaeology is today pushing back the dates of fixed and acknowledged history almost to the date given by the Egyptians to Solon for the submersion of the great Atlantean island; and if we can but read the Maya glyphs, and open that door, another twenty years from now may show us beyond all possible dispute evidences in every part of the earth belt of a contemporaneous culture, different from and precedent to the Aryan. ”

“ Indeed the very persistence with which the interpretation (which will certainly be self-evident and everywhere applicable when it does finally come) still eludes us, is a sufficient proof that we have not yet found the right road. When we do, great doorways to the past of mankind will open of themselves, and we will know more of human life and evolution than we now guess. Until then we can only describe, classify, and try to get rid of some of the mechanical impedimenta of the search.
What we have of the Perez Codex is manifestly but a fragment ”

“ Let it simply be agreed, as it now is by all science, that the evolution of form is a universal and well evidenced principle, working out through the various well established and comprehensible incidents, such as natural selection, adaptation to environment, and so on—yet this statement of the fact is not an explanation of its cause. ”

“ All over the American continent at the time of the Discovery we see cultures and systems whose time had come. Back of most of the North and South American tribes we find the remains of mighty and utterly extinct civilizations—only their dim memory left. In the centers of higher culture from Mexico to Peru we see the ancient civilization brought further down to our own times; but there also, in process, all the incidents of break-up and an expiring greatness. ”

“ That coincident with a new and universal world-epoch, as wide in its cultural scope as the difference between the ideographic and literal, there was finally formed a totally new vehicle for the use of human thought, the inflectional, literal, alphabetic. That this vehicle was perfected into some great speech, the direct ancestor of Sanskrit, into the forms of which were concentrated all the old power of the ancient hieroglyphs and their underlying concepts. For Sanskrit, while the oldest is also the mightiest of Aryan grammars ”

“ But when, as their strangeness wears away, one comes to see the unfailing accuracy with which the glyphs are drawn, one’s opinion of their makers has to change. And when, with this familiarity gained, one advances to an appreciation of the work in its bearings as a whole, one has to acknowledge himself facing the production of craftsmen who had the inheritance of not only generations, but ages of training. Such a combination of complete mastery in composition, perfect control of definite and fixed forms, and hand technique, can grow up from barbarism in no few hundred years. ”

“ The time has passed when we think that the absence of our perspective drawing in Japanese pictures is due to the fact that these “children of nature” never happened to recognize that a thing looks smaller in proportion to its distance, so that they ought to come to us to learn. We have come, in some measure if not yet fully, to recognize that whereas we show a thing to the eye, these other peoples suggest a thought to the mind, by their pictures. ”

“ If we will now regard the languages and cultures of the world, we will find all the phases of linguistic and cultural activity, operative with about the same degree of rapidity, all over both hemispheres, save in places protected by our Law of Retardation. We will find the rate of changes and successions generally far less rapid the farther back in time we go ”

“ Some languages have the strong impress of impersonality, without any loss of virility; others are strongly egotistic and self-assertive, with perhaps the braggart’s lack of genuine strength. Each spoken language that we know has its own color and tone, to which our thought must respond, if we would know and use it well. ”

“ For not only mere bulk is to be considered—though there is enough of that scattered over the earth to keep all the possible available craftsmen of the world a wholly incommensurate time achieving them, but the ability to conceive and carry out such works. What sort of people leveled Monte Alban for its crown of pyramids, dreamed and executed the stucco modelings of Palenque, built the temple of Boro Budur in Java, cut the Bamian statues of the Hindû Kush, and so on, and so on, for page after page? ”

“ In the Perez Codex at least, nothing is to be taken for granted, nothing charged to a careless scribe, and no variants regarded as being identical in value—with a very few exceptions, to which I shall advert later. Wherever there remains enough of any glyph to show its characteristic strokes, it can be regarded as safely indicated; whenever the strokes are not just those characteristic of any glyph, it cannot be inferred. Down to the very end of the various revisions I found myself able to add glyphs which at first seemed hopeless, and yet when once seen became clear and plain. ”

“ Those who study language (perhaps one should here say, languages) as a phenomenon, a set of external forms, an act, a thing done, get little use out of von Humboldt’s work. Those who see it as a human “activity,” an energy, get much. ”