Writing is an entirely new kind of language, and implies a complete change in the relations of man’s waking-consciousness, in that it _liberates it from the tyranny of the present_. Picture-languages which portray objects are far older, older probably than any words; but here the picture is no longer an immediate denotation of some sight-object, but primarily the sign of a word--i.e., something already abstract from sensation. It is the first and only example of a language that demands, without itself providing, the necessary preparatory training.

Script, therefore, presupposes a fully developed grammar, since the activity of writing and reading is infinitely more abstract than that of speaking and hearing. Reading consists in scanning a script-image _with a feeling of the significances of corresponding word-sounds_; what script contains is not signs for things, but signs for other signs. The grammatical sense must be enlarged by instantaneous comprehension.

The word is a possession of man generally, whereas writing belongs exclusively to Culture-men. In contrast to verbal language it is conditioned, not merely partially, but entirely, by the political and religious Destinies of world-history. All scripts come into being in the _individual_ Cultures and are to be reckoned amongst their profoundest symbols. But hitherto a comprehensive history of script has never been produced, and a psychology of its forms and their modifications has never even been attempted. _Writing is the grand symbol of the Far_, meaning not only extension-distance, but also, and above all, duration and future and the will-to-eternity. Speaking and listening take place only in proximity and the present,[206] but through script one speaks to men whom one has never seen, who may not even have been born yet; the voice of a man is heard centuries after he has passed away. It is one of the first distinguishing marks of the _historical_ endowment. But for that very reason nothing is more characteristic of a Culture than its inward relation to writing. If we know as little as we do about Indogermanic, it is because the two earliest Cultures whose people made use of this system--the Indian and the Classical--were so _a-historic_ in disposition that they not only formed no script of their own, but even fought off alien scripts until well into the Late period of their course. Actually, the whole art of Classical prose is designed immediately for the ear. One read it as if one were speaking, whereas we, by comparison, speak everything as though we were reading it--with the result that in the eternal seesaw between script-image and word-sound we have never attained to a prose style that is perfect in the Attic sense. In the Arabian Culture, on the other hand, each religion developed its own script and kept it even through changes of verbal language; the duration of the sacred books and teachings and the script as symbol of duration belong together. The oldest evidences of alphabetical script are found in southern Arabia in the Minæan and Sabæan scripts--differentiated, without doubt, according to sect--which probably go back to the tenth century before Christ.[207] The Jews, Mandæans, and Manichæans in Babylonia spoke Eastern Aramaic, but all of them had scripts of their own. From the Abbassid period onward Arabic ruled, but Christians and Jews wrote it in their own characters.[208] Islam spread the Arabic script universally amongst its adherents, irrespective of whether their spoken language was Semitic, Mongolian, Aryan, or a Negro tongue.[209] The growth of the writing habit brings with it, everywhere and inevitably, the distinction between the written and the colloquial languages. The written language brings the symbolism of duration to bear upon its own grammatical condition, which itself yields only slowly and reluctantly to the progressive modifications of the colloquial language--the latter, therefore, always representing at any given moment a younger condition. There is not one Hellenic κοινή, but two,[210] and the immense distance between the written and the living Latin of Imperial times is sufficiently evidenced in the structure of the early Romance languages.[211] The older a Civilization becomes, the more abrupt is the distinction, until we have the gap that to-day separates written Chinese from Kuan-Chua, the spoken language of educated North Chinese--a matter no longer of two dialects but of two reciprocally alien languages.

Here, it should be observed, we have direct expression of the fact that writing is above everything a matter of status, and more particularly an ancient privilege of priesthood. The peasantry is without history _and therefore without writing_. But, even apart from this, there is in Race an unmistakable antipathy to script. It is, I think, a fact of the highest importance to graphology that the more the writer has race (breed), the more cavalierly he treats the ornamental structure of the letters, and the more ready he is to replace this by personal line-pictures. Only the Taboo-man evidences a certain respect for the proper forms of the letters and ever, if unconsciously, tries to reproduce them. It is the distinction between the man of action, who makes history, and the scholar, who merely puts it down on paper, “eternalizes” it. In all Cultures the script is in the keeping of the priesthood, in which class we have to count also the poet and the scholars. The nobility despises writing; it has people to write for it. From the remotest times this activity has had something intellectual-sacerdotal about it. Timeless truths came to be such, not at all through speech, but only when there came to be script for them. It is the opposition of castle and cathedral over again: which shall endure, deed or truth? The archivist’s “sources” preserve facts, the holy scripture, truths. What chronicles and documents mean in the first-named, exegesis and library mean in the second. And thus there is something besides cult-architecture that is not decorated with ornament, but _is_ ornament[212]--the _book_. The art-history of all Cultural springtimes ought to begin with the script, and the cursive script even before the monumental. Here we can observe the essence of the Gothic style, or of the Magian, at its purest. No other ornament possesses the inwardness of a letter-shape or a manuscript page; nowhere else is arabesque as perfect as it is in the Koran texts on the walls of a mosque. And, then, the great art of initials, the architecture of the marginal picture, the plastic of the covers! In a Koran in the Kufi script every page has the effect of a piece of tapestry. A Gothic book of the Gospels is, as it were, a little cathedral. As for Classical art, it is very significant that the one thing that it did not beautify with its touch was the script and the book-roll--an exception founded in its steady hatred of that which endures, the contempt for a technique which insists on being more than a technique. Neither in Hellas nor in India do we find an art of monumental inscription as in Egypt. It does not seem to have occurred to anybody that a sheet of handwriting of Plato was a relic, or that a fine edition of the dramas of Sophocles ought to be treasured up in the Acropolis.

As the city lifted up its head over the countryside, as the burgher joined the noble and the priest and the urban spirit aspired to supremacy, writing, from being a herald of nobles’ fame and of eternal truths, became a means of commercial and scientific intercourse. The Indian and the Classical Cultures rejected the pretension and met the working requirement by importation from abroad; it was as a humble tool of everyday use that alphabetical script slowly won their acceptance. With this event rank, as contemporaneous and like in significance, the introduction into China of the phonetic script about 800, and the discovery of book-printing in the West in the fifteenth century; the symbol of duration and distance was reinforced in the highest degree by making it accessible to the large number. Finally the Civilizations took the last step and brought their scripts into utilitarian form. As we have seen, the discovery of alphabetical script in the Egyptian Civilization, about 2000, was a purely technical innovation. In the same way Li Si, Chancellor to the Chinese Augustus, introduced the Chinese standard script in 227. And lastly, amongst ourselves--though as yet few of us have appreciated the real significance of the fact--a new kind of writing has appeared. That Egyptian alphabetic script is in no wise a final and perfected thing is proved by the discovery of its fellow, our _stenography_, which means no mere shortening of writing, but _the overcoming of the alphabetic script by a new and highly abstract mode of communication_. It is not impossible, indeed, that in the course of the next centuries script-forms of the shorthand kind may displace letters completely.