216 ADVANCEMENT OP LEARNING. [BOOK VI, 



express, not their letters or words, but things and notions; 

 insomuch, that numerous nations, though of quite different 

 languages, yet, agreeing in the use of these characters, hold 

 correspondence by writing. 6 And thus a book written in such 

 characters, may be read and interpreted by each nation in its 

 own respective language. 



The signs of things significative without the help or in 

 terposition of words are therefore of two kinds, the one 

 congruous, the one arbitrary. Of the first kind, are hiero 

 glyphics and gestures ; of the second, real characters. The 

 use of hieroglyphics is of great antiquity, being held in 

 veneration, especially among that most ancient nation, the 

 Egyptians, insomuch that this seems to have been an early 

 kind of writing, prior to the invention of letters, unless, 

 perhaps, among the Jews. f And gestures are a kind of 

 transitory hieroglyphics ; for as words are fleeting in the 

 pronunciation, but permanent when written down, so hiero 

 glyphics, expressed by gesture, are momentary; but when 



adopted hieroglyphical writing, so designed as to convey, without the in 

 terposition of oral signs, the exact ideas which they represent, yet each of 

 these signs would invariably awaken the idea which represented it in the 

 oral language, as well as the vocal word refer to the idea indicated by 

 the written hieroglyphic. The only persons who appear not to intrude 

 intermediate signs between the hieroglyphic and the idea which it con 

 veys to the mind, are those who are incapacitated by nature. But in 

 this respect there is no resemblance between the deaf and dumb and 

 our Asiatic contemporaries. 



Bacon therefore has not seized the exact distinction between the 

 Chinese writing and our own, which consists not in dispensing with vocal 

 signs, but in the diversified elements of which it is composed. Our 

 language contains only twenty-five letters, while the Chinese letters are 

 as innumerable as our words ; and what makes the distinction perhaps 

 more startling, there never has been an attempt on the part of that 

 nation to analyze this infinite series of words, or to reduce them to the 

 common elements of vocal sounds. Through this want of philosophic 

 analysis, which characterizes nearly all the Asiatic tribes, the Chinese 

 may be said never perfectly to understand their own language. Ed. 



e See Spizelius &quot; De Re Literaria Chinensium,&quot; ed. Lugd. Bat. 

 1660 ; Webb s &quot; Historical Essay upon the Chinese Language,&quot; printed 

 at London, 1669 ; Father Besnier s &quot; Reunion des Langues;&quot; Fathei le 

 Compe, and other of the Missionaries Letters. Ed. 



f See Causinus s &quot;Polyhistor Symbolicus,&quot; and &quot; Symbolica ^Egyp- 

 tiorum Sapientia,&quot; ed. Par. 1618. And for other writers upon this 

 Bubject, see Morhof s &quot;Polyhistor,&quot; torn, i, lib, IV. cap. 2, d? 



