its own conceptual content.  Both are ceaselessly changing, but, on the whole, the form tends to linger on when the spirit has flown or changed its being.  Irrational form, form for form’s sake—­however we term this tendency to hold on to formal distinctions once they have come to be—­is as natural to the life of language as is the retention of modes of conduct that have long outlived the meaning they once had.

[Footnote 61:  Aside, naturally, from the life and imminence that may be created for such a sentence by a particular context.]

[Footnote 62:  This has largely happened in popular French and German, where the difference is stylistic rather than functional.  The preterits are more literary or formal in tone than the perfects.]

There is another powerful tendency which makes for a formal elaboration that does not strictly correspond to clear-cut conceptual differences.  This is the tendency to construct schemes of classification into which all the concepts of language must be fitted.  Once we have made up our minds that all things are either definitely good or bad or definitely black or white, it is difficult to get into the frame of mind that recognizes that any particular thing may be both good and bad (in other words, indifferent) or both black and white (in other words, gray), still more difficult to realize that the good-bad or black-white categories may not apply at all.  Language is in many respects as unreasonable and stubborn about its classifications as is such a mind.  It must have its perfectly exclusive pigeon-holes and will tolerate no flying vagrants.  Any concept that asks for expression must submit to the classificatory rules of the game, just as there are statistical surveys in which even the most convinced atheist must perforce be labeled Catholic, Protestant, or Jew or get no hearing.  In English we have made up our minds that all action must be conceived of in reference to three standard times.  If, therefore, we desire to state a proposition that is as true to-morrow as it was yesterday, we have to pretend that the present moment may be elongated fore and aft so as to take in all eternity.[63] In French we know once for all that an object is masculine or feminine, whether it be living or not; just as in many American and East Asiatic languages it must be understood to belong to a certain form-category (say, ring-round, ball-round, long and slender, cylindrical, sheet-like, in mass like sugar) before it can be enumerated (e.g., “two ball-class potatoes,” “three sheet-class carpets”) or even said to “be” or “be handled in a definite way” (thus, in the Athabaskan languages and in Yana, “to carry” or “throw” a pebble is quite another thing than to carry or throw a log, linguistically no less than in terms of muscular experience).  Such instances might be multiplied at will.  It is almost as though at some period in the past the unconscious mind of the race had made a hasty inventory of experience,