is the activity differentiated from its means, but the means are differentiated from their significance. The unity of the two not only ceases to be a matter of self-evidence, it ceases even to be a possibility. The feeling of significance is a living feeling and, like everything else belonging with Time and Destiny, it is uniquely occurring and non-recurring. No sign, however well known and habitually used, is ever repeated with exactly the same connotation; and hence it is that originally no sign ever recurred in the same form. The domain of the rigid sign is unconditionally one of things-become of the pure extended; it is not an organism, but a system, which possesses its own causal logic and brings the irreconcilable opposition of space and time, intellect and mood, also into the waking connexions of two beings.
This fixed stock of signs and motives, with its ostensibly fixed meanings, must be acquired by learning and practice if one wishes to belong to the community of waking-consciousness with which it is associated. The necessary concomitant of speech divorced from speaking is the notion of the school. This if fully developed in the higher animals; and in every self-contained religion, every art, every society, it is presupposed as the background of the believer, the artist, the "well-brought-up" human being. And from this point each community has its sharply defined frontier; to be a member one must know its language — i.e., its articles of faith, its ethics, its rules. In counterpoint and Catholicism alike, bliss is not to be compassed by mere feeling and goodwill. Culture means a hitherto unimagined intensification of the depth and strictness of the form-language in every department; for each individual belonging to it, it consists — as his personal Culture, religious, ethical, social, artistic — in a lifelong process of education and training for this life. And consequently in all great arts, in the great Churches, mysteries and orders, there is reached such a command of form as astonishes the human being himself, and ends by breaking itself under the stress of its own exigences — whereupon, in every Culture alike, there is set up (expressly or tacitly) the slogan of a "return to nature." This maestria extends also to verbal language. Side by side with the social polish of the period of the Tyrannis or of the troubadours, with the fugues of Bach and the vase-paintings of Exekias,[1] we have the art of Attic oratory and that of French conversation, both presupposing, like any other art, a strict and carefully matured convention and a long and exacting training of the individual.
Metaphysically the significance of this separating-off of a set language can hardly be over-estimated. The daily practice of intercourse in settled forms, and the command of the entire waking-consciousness through such forms — of which there is no longer a sensed process of formation ad hoc, but which are
- ↑ Exekias — represented in the British Museum by his "Achilles and Penthesilea" (Ency. Brit., XI ed., article "Ceramics," Plate I) — stands at the end of Black Figure as the master of the possibilities of refinement in it — on the verge of the style-change to Red Figure, yet apart from it. Sebastian Bach is his "contemporary." — Tr.
