________________
192
THE MYSTERY LANGUAGE
ideas, and had been devised to that intent. Under this view, I ventured to call this method of writing ideographic; and the letters I desiguated ideograms.
These ideograms had distinctive characteristics and capabilities amongst themselves, whether taken individually or in combination; and recognizing this fact, even under their transformed value, grammarians have divided them into classes-not always those of the ideographic usage.
Of the ideograms, the less persistent and more flexible were the inflectors on the reinainder, in which character their idealizing power became latent in their inflecting office, and was merged in that of the ideograph or wordsigu whose derived idea they then modified; while the least persistent and most flexible assumed the force of creative factors. Under this aspect what afterwards came to be regarded as the representatives of words, or word-sigus, were in reality ideographic formulas in which primitive ideograms were variously combined, that the ideas they signified might be interblended and inflected, or modified and applied. Thus each primitive idea had its own proper representative, which held the same relation to the elemental idea that chemical symbols have to the elementary constituents of natural objects, that algebraic signs bear to quantitative relations, and modern numerals to the enumerating methods they replace.
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
