tones grew into words; and consonants grew on to the vowels, to make the vast and varied distinctions the evolving intellect needed for its uses; and presently you had Atlantis with its complex civilization—­its infinitely more complex civilization even than our own; and grammar came ever more into being, ever more wonderful and complex, to correspond with the growing curves and involutions of the ever more complex-growing human brain; and a thousand languages were formed—­many of them to be found still among wild tribes in mid-Africa or America—­as much more complex than Sanskrit, as Sanskrit is than Chinese:  highly declensional, minutely syntactical, involved and worked up and filigreed beyond telling;—­and that was at the midmost point and highest material civilization of Atlantis.  And then the Fourth Race went on, and its languages evolved; back, in the seventh sub-race, to the tonalism, the chanted simplicity of the first sub-race;—­till you had something in character not intellectual, but spiritual:—­Chinese.  And meanwhile—­I am throwing out the ideas as they come, careless if the second appears to contradict the first:  presently a unity may come of them;—­meanwhile, for the purposes of the Fifth Root-Race, then nascent, a language-type had grown up, intellectual as any in Atlantis, because this Fifth Race was to be intellectual too,—­ but also spiritual:  not without tonalistic elements:  a thing to be chanted, and not dully spoken:—­and there, when the time came for, it to be born, you had the Sanskrit.

But now for the Sixth Root-Race:  is that to figure mainly on the plane of intellect?  Or shall we then take intellectual things somewhat for granted, as having learnt them and passed on to something higher?  Look at those diagrams of the planes and globes in The Secret Doctrine, and see how the last ones, the sixth and seventh, come to be on the same level as the first and second.  Shall we be passing, then, to a time when, in the seventh, our languages will have no need for complexity:  when our ideas, no longer personal but universal and creative, will flow easily from mind to mind, from heart to heart on a little tone, a chanted breath of music; when mere billiard-balls of syllables will serve us, so they be rightly sung:—­until presently with but seven pure vowel sounds, and seven tones to sing them to, we shall be able to tell forth once more the whole of the Glory of God?

Now then, is Chinese primitive, or is it an evolution far away and ahead of us?  Were there first of all billiard-balls; and did they acquire a trick of coalescing and running together; this one and that one, in the combination, becoming subordinate to another; until soon you had a little wriggling creature of a word, with his head of prefix, and his tail of suffix, to look or flicker this way or that according to the direction in which he wished to steer himself, the meaning to be expressed;—­from monosyllabic becoming agglutinative, synthetic, declensional, complex—­Alpine