of the associations of the popular mind. Humboldt has ingeniously suggested that the very meagreness of the grammar increases the keenness of instinct in recognizing these connections ; while a more elaborate ayntax may tend to mystify or deaden such a sense.
Inorinorganic elements.
After all these expedients, there remains a large inorganic element in the stiff isolation of Chinese words. It is in contrast with the social fusibility of the race, and their defective individuality ; but it corresponds with the measured uniformity of their mental action, and the habit of seeing things in detail more than in wholes. It illustrates the tendency of mechanical routine to atomize the mind, substituting the mere succession or repetition of forms for the perception of relations. The ways in which this defect is counteracted being so purely matters of national feeling and education, our acquaintance with the literature must be of slow and difficult growth. We have already noticed the imperfection of the Chinese Lack of sensQ oi soiiud. On that mystic world, intermediate interest in between thought and concrete form, the Hindu pauses, allured by its far reaches and hints of the infinite. Notwithstanding his dislike of analysis, he has pressed to its ultimate elements and constructed his wonderful alphabetic speech. But the Chinese skips such spheres in his haste for the written sign. His interest in sound is confined to its moral uses on the one hand, and its concrete materials on the other. No people has so earnestly preached the educational uses of music, nor sought so indefatigably to make effective actual music. The number of instruments mentioned in their old books is astonishing.2 In this ethical direction is their ideal attraction. Yet the study of the art and science itself is in its rudiments.
- See also Bastian's Peking, p. 532.
2 Dennys's lecture in Journ. 0/ N, Ch. Br, of R, A. S., No. viii.
