it is as regardless of the feelings and sentiments of its speakers as is the course of a river of the atmospheric humors of the landscape.  I am convinced that it is futile to look in linguistic structure for differences corresponding to the temperamental variations which are supposed to be correlated with race.  In this connection it is well to remember that the emotional aspect of our psychic life is but meagerly expressed in the build of language[193].

[Footnote 192:  “Temperament” is a difficult term to work with.  A great deal of what is loosely charged to national “temperament” is really nothing but customary behavior, the effect of traditional ideals of conduct.  In a culture, for instance, that does not look kindly upon demonstrativeness, the natural tendency to the display of emotion becomes more than normally inhibited.  It would be quite misleading to argue from the customary inhibition, a cultural fact, to the native temperament.  But ordinarily we can get at human conduct only as it is culturally modified.  Temperament in the raw is a highly elusive thing.]

[Footnote 193:  See pages 39, 40.]

[Transcriber’s note:  Footnote 193 refers to the paragraph beginning on line 1256.]

Language and our thought-grooves are inextricably interwoven, are, in a sense, one and the same.  As there is nothing to show that there are significant racial differences in the fundamental conformation of thought, it follows that the infinite variability of linguistic form, another name for the infinite variability of the actual process of thought, cannot be an index of such significant racial differences.  This is only apparently a paradox.  The latent content of all languages is the same—­the intuitive science of experience.  It is the manifest form that is never twice the same, for this form, which we call linguistic morphology, is nothing more nor less than a collective art of thought, an art denuded of the irrelevancies of individual sentiment.  At last analysis, then, language can no more flow from race as such than can the sonnet form.

Nor can I believe that culture and language are in any true sense causally related.  Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks.  Language is a particular how of thought.  It is difficult to see what particular causal relations may be expected to subsist between a selected inventory of experience (culture, a significant selection made by society) and the particular manner in which the society expresses all experience.  The drift of culture, another way of saying history, is a complex series of changes in society’s selected inventory—­additions, losses, changes of emphasis and relation.  The drift of language is not properly concerned with changes of content at all, merely with changes in formal expression.  It is possible, in thought, to change every sound, word, and concrete concept of a language without changing its inner actuality in the least, just as one can pour