COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



common origin ? Or consider the French larme 

 and the English tear. These words are de- 

 monstrably descended from the same ancestral 

 form dakru-ma. But while the South Aryan 

 form has undergone one kind of change into 

 the Latin lacru-ma, and thence into the French 

 larme ; the North Aryan form has undergone 

 another kind of change into the Old German 

 tagr, and thence into the English tear. 



Thus in general, as we go backward in time, 

 we find the lines of linguistic development draw- 

 ing together. Between the various Low-Dutch 

 dialects spoken along the north coast of Ger- 

 many, the differences are hardly great enough 

 to interfere with mutual intelligibility. Again, 

 between Portuguese and Spanish the differences 

 are so small that one who is well acquainted with 

 Spanish can often get the sense of many pages 

 in a Portuguese book without having specially 

 studied the latter language. But German and 

 Spanish have few mutually intelligible words in 

 common, and their differences in idioms and in 

 structure of sentences are no less conspicuous. 

 While it might be possible to maintain that 

 Dutch and Platt-Deutsch, or that Portuguese 

 and Spanish, are only dialects of the same lan- 

 guage, no one would hesitate about calling Teu- 

 tonic and Romance quite different forms of lan- 

 guage. Yet we need only go back far enough to 

 find the demarcation quite as obscure in the one 

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