of selected languages.  To take, as the sum total of our material, Latin, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, and perhaps Eskimo or Sioux as an afterthought, is to court disaster.  We have no right to assume that a sprinkling of exotic types will do to supplement the few languages nearer home that we are more immediately interested in.  Thirdly, the strong craving for a simple formula[92] has been the undoing of linguists.  There is something irresistible about a method of classification that starts with two poles, exemplified, say, by Chinese and Latin, clusters what it conveniently can about these poles, and throws everything else into a “transitional type.”  Hence has arisen the still popular classification of languages into an “isolating” group, an “agglutinative” group, and an “inflective” group.  Sometimes the languages of the American Indians are made to straggle along as an uncomfortable “polysynthetic” rear-guard to the agglutinative languages.  There is justification for the use of all of these terms, though not perhaps in quite the spirit in which they are commonly employed.  In any case it is very difficult to assign all known languages to one or other of these groups, the more so as they are not mutually exclusive.  A language may be both agglutinative and inflective, or inflective and polysynthetic, or even polysynthetic and isolating, as we shall see a little later on.

[Footnote 92:  If possible, a triune formula.]

There is a fourth reason why the classification of languages has generally proved a fruitless undertaking.  It is probably the most powerful deterrent of all to clear thinking.  This is the evolutionary prejudice which instilled itself into the social sciences towards the middle of the last century and which is only now beginning to abate its tyrannical hold on our mind.  Intermingled with this scientific prejudice and largely anticipating it was another, a more human one.  The vast majority of linguistic theorists themselves spoke languages of a certain type, of which the most fully developed varieties were the Latin and Greek that they had learned in their childhood.  It was not difficult for them to be persuaded that these familiar languages represented the “highest” development that speech had yet attained and that all other types were but steps on the way to this beloved “inflective” type.  Whatever conformed to the pattern of Sanskrit and Greek and Latin and German was accepted as expressive of the “highest,” whatever departed from it was frowned upon as a shortcoming or was at best an interesting aberration.[93] Now any classification that starts with preconceived values or that works up to sentimental satisfactions is self-condemned as unscientific.  A linguist that insists on talking about the Latin type of morphology as though it were necessarily the high-water mark of linguistic development is like the zooelogist that sees in the organic world a huge conspiracy to evolve the race-horse or the Jersey