Important as they are, however, we must not be misled by this little group of words into supposing that English is a language which has given away much. On the contrary, surveying it as a whole, we are struck, above all, by the ease with which it has itself appropriated the linguistic products of others. Like Mr. Shaw’s Shakespeare, its genius seems to have lain not so much in originality as in the snapping up of unconsidered trifles; and where it has excelled all the other languages of Europe, possibly of the world, is in the grace with which it has hitherto digested these particles of foreign matter and turned them into its own life’s blood. Historically, the English language is a muddle; actually it is a beautiful, personal, and highly sensitive creature. PART II THE WESTERN OUTLOOK CHAPTER V MYTH _Panic._ _Tuesday._ _Money._ _Sorcery._ _Man._ Let us take two common English words, _panic_ and _cereal_, and compare them etymologically; we owe both of them to the personages of classical mythology. _Cereal_ comes to us from Ceres, the Roman goddess of corn and flowers, and _panic_ is from Pan, a Greek Nature-god, who was regarded as the protector of flocks and herds. But here the resemblance ends; for not only is one Latin and the other Greek, but one is the name of an object which we can touch and see, while the other relates to that inner world of human consciousness which cannot be grasped with hands. Now it is important to notice that the _word_ is very much more closely connected with the _thing_ in the case of _panic_ than in the case of _cereal_. Certainly, we are interested to know that one of our words for corn is derived from the name of a Roman goddess, but we do not feel that it has much effect on our own ideas about corn. We feel, in fact, that a study of the word _cereal_ will tell us something about Rome, but very little either about corn or about ourselves. With _panic_ it is different. In that intangible inner world words are themselves, as it were, the solid materials. Yet they are not solid as stones are, but rather as human faces, which sometimes change their form as the inner man changes, and sometimes, remaining practically unaltered, express with the same configuration a developed personality. “Human speech and human thought,” said the psychologist, Wundt, “are everywhere coincident.... The development of human consciousness includes in itself the development of modes of expression. Language is an essential element of the function of thinking.”