expression-technique. On the other hand, the impression produced for the purpose of an understanding is called the Sign, and is the elementary unit of all communication-technique — including, therefore, at the highest level, human speech.
Of the extensiveness of both these speech-worlds in the waking-consciousness of man we to-day can scarcely form an idea. Expression-speech, which appears in the earliest times with all the religious seriousness of the Taboo, includes not only weighty and strict ornament — which in the beginning coincides completely with the idea of art and makes every stiff, inert thing into a vehicle of the expression — but also the solemn ceremonial — whose web of formulæ spreads over the whole of public life, and even over that of the family[1] — and the language of costume, which is contained in clothing, tattooing, and personal adornment, all of which have a uniform significance. The investigators of the nineteenth century vainly attempted to trace the origin of clothing to the feeling of shame or to utilitarian motives. It is in fact intelligible only as the means of an expression-speech, and as such it is developed to a grandiose level in all the high Civilizations, including our own of to-day. We need only think of the dominant part played by the "mode" in our whole public life and doings, the regulation attire for important occasions, the nuances of wear for this and that social function, the wedding-dress, mourning; of the military uniform, the priest's robes, orders and decorations, mitre and tonsure, periwig and queue, powder, rings, styles of hairdressing; of all the significant displays and concealments of person, the costume of the mandarin and the senator, the odalisque and the nun; of the court-state of Nero, Saladin and Montezuma — not to mention the details of peasant costumes, the language of flowers, colours, and precious stones. As for the language of religion, it is superfluous to mention it, for all this is religion.
The communication-languages, in which every kind of sense-impression that it is possible to conceive more or less participates, have gradually evolved (so far as the peoples of the higher Cultures are concerned) three outstanding signs — picture, sound, and gesture, which in the script-speech of the Western Civilization have crystallized into a unit of letter, word, and punctuation mark.
In the course of this long evolution there comes about at the last the detachment of speaking from speech. Of all processes in the history of language, none has a wider bearing than this. Originally all motives and signs are unquestionably the product of the moment and meant only for a single individual act of the active waking-consciousness. Their actual and their felt and willed significances are one and the same. But this is no longer so when a definite stock of signs offers itself for the living act of giving the sign, for with that not only
- ↑ Jesus says to the Seventy whom he is sending out on mission: "And salute no man on the way" (Luke x, 4). The ceremonial of greeting on the high-road is so complicated that people in a hurry have to omit it. A. Bertholet, Kulturgeschichte Israels (1919), p. 161.
