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THE MYSTERY LANGUAGE
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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 remainder, in which character their idealizing power became latent in their inflecting office, and was merged in that of the ideograph or wordsign 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-signs, were in reality ideographic formulas in which primitive ideograins 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.
Either of these can be expressed in words-but they are so expressed at the cost of consciousness and a clear and facile comprehensibility. Either of these is equally intelligible to all versed in their several significances, irrespective of language as a vehicle.
Even in the present day the value of such a system, in association with language—when the word take the place of the idea and forms the basis of the signs
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