Spiritual culture may develop in the directions of knowing and of feeling. These two forms of the manifestation of consciousness are originally not to be separated from each other; but as time goes on, a preponderance of one or the other becomes noticeable. Language is the first result of spiritual culture: the communication of thoughts by means of words (sound pictures of ideas). Language arises from the necessities of life, from the need for communication among the members of a social aggregate. [Illustration: GUTENBERG, THE INVENTOR OF PRINTING Nothing has eclipsed the printing press as an agency of man’s intellectual and spiritual advancement. ] A much later acquisition, the art of writing, or the fixation of language in a definite, permanent form, stands in close connection with speech. Writing develops according to two systems: the one based on the symbolising or picturing of ideas--picture-writing, hieroglyphics; and the other on the breaking up of the speech-sounds of a language into a notation of syllables or letters--syllabic or letter writing. According to the first method thoughts are directly pictured; according to the second, sounds, not ideas, are represented by symbols--that is, the sounds which stand for the ideas are transformed into signs. The transition from sign to syllabic writing comes about in this manner: if, during its development, a language uses the same sound to express various conceptions, men represent this sound by one sign; and whenever a foreign word is reproduced in writing it is first separated into syllables, and the syllables are then pictured by the same signs as are employed to represent similar sounds--but different ideas--in the native speech. Thus symbols are employed more and more phonetically, and less and less meaning comes to be attached to them. This process must continue its development if the pronunciation changes as time goes on; the old writing, with its national symbol-method, may be retained; but with the changing of speech-sounds the new writing is altered; syllables are now represented by signs, and combinations of syllables are reproduced by means of a combination of their corresponding symbols. Thus phonetic writing was not an invention, but a gradual development. Together with the phonetic symbols, ideograms or hieroglyphs also exist, as in Babylonian. It is especially interesting, and indicative of the unity of the human mind, that the transition to syllabic writing has been arrived at independently by different races; the Aztecs, for example, exhibit a wholly independent development. [Sidenote: The Spreading of Ideas]