[Footnote 79:  Ultimately, also historical—­say, age to “act that (one).”]

The answer is simple and is implied in the preceding remarks.  The most fundamental and the most powerful of all relating methods is the method of order.  Let us think of some more or less concrete idea, say a color, and set down its symbol—­red; of another concrete idea, say a person or object, setting down its symbol—­dog; finally, of a third concrete idea, say an action, setting down its symbol—­run.  It is hardly possible to set down these three symbols—­red dog run—­without relating them in some way, for example (the) red dog run(s).  I am far from wishing to state that the proposition has always grown up in this analytic manner, merely that the very process of juxtaposing concept to concept, symbol to symbol, forces some kind of relational “feeling,” if nothing else, upon us.  To certain syntactic adhesions we are very sensitive, for example, to the attributive relation of quality (red dog) or the subjective relation (dog run) or the objective relation (kill dog), to others we are more indifferent, for example, to the attributive relation of circumstance (to-day red dog run or red dog to-day run or red dog run to-day, all of which are equivalent propositions or propositions in embryo).  Words and elements, then, once they are listed in a certain order, tend not only to establish some kind of relation among themselves but are attracted to each other in greater or in less degree.  It is presumably this very greater or less that ultimately leads to those firmly solidified groups of elements (radical element or elements plus one or more grammatical elements) that we have studied as complex words.  They are in all likelihood nothing but sequences that have shrunk together and away from other sequences or isolated elements in the flow of speech.  While they are fully alive, in other words, while they are functional at every point, they can keep themselves at a psychological distance from their neighbors.  As they gradually lose much of their life, they fall back into the embrace of the sentence as a whole and the sequence of independent words regains the importance it had in part transferred to the crystallized groups of elements.  Speech is thus constantly tightening and loosening its sequences.  In its highly integrated forms (Latin, Eskimo) the “energy” of sequence is largely locked up in complex word formations, it becomes transformed into a kind of potential energy that may not be released for millennia.  In its more analytic forms (Chinese, English) this energy is mobile, ready to hand for such service as we demand of it.