modern languages. We are to-day inclined to forget that our life of culture still has all its roots in a condition which was characterised by the universal predominance of such a language—of Latin; that many most important remains of this predominance still exist; that in certain spheres, i.e., as the language of courts and of diplomacy, it was directly succeeded—in the seventeenth century—by French, and that this language also still retains a high degree of international application. In all these cases we have good ground to speak of a “conventional” acceptance. The relation which every one feels to a foreign language, especially when it has not yet “entered into his flesh and blood,” is very different from his relation to his mother-tongue; the former resembles more the use of an instrument, the latter the use of an innate organ. Hence also when several people together use such an instrument for their mutual understanding, they are related to it as if they had established the meanings of these signs by agreement. At first, indeed, they are chained to the spirit, i.e., the will or associations of this foreign language; but the more they express their particular common affairs in this material, the more easily they handle it with a certain freedom, without meeting the hindrances which the “language-feeling,” the habit and memory of the rules of their own language, opposes. But even in the mother-tongue there is developed by “business,” i.e., by all human intercourse in which each consciously pursues his own profit, an invention and use of words and turns of speech having a specific acceptance, which is similar to a conventional one. The social will contained therein differs from the naive impulse to form language in its “reflective” nature; it is conceivable in its ripe form only upon the basis of an old culture, its language is essentially a written language, its style a paper style.
51. The free handling of a given material is characteristic for all forms in which a free social will shapes itself; but such a one is the will which must be reduced to the acts of the allied individuals themselves. We include here both the will which attains to expression in a normal legislation, and that which attains expression in a normal science. It is clear how legislation can proceed from convention. When any society elects a Commission, and instructs it to draw up the conventional rules accepted in it, altering them as may seem good, replacing the less expedient by the more expedient, and determines unanimously to conform to these new rules—then this Commission becomes a legislative body. Such an origin and authorisation of legislation is here
