In the course of this long evolution there comes about at the last the _detachment of speaking from speech_. Of all processes in the history of language, none has a wider bearing than this. Originally all motives and signs are unquestionably the product of the moment and meant only for a single individual act of the active waking-consciousness. Their actual and their felt and willed significances are one and the same. But this is no longer so when a _definite stock of signs offers itself_ for the living act of giving the sign, for with that not only is the activity differentiated from its means, but the means are differentiated _from their significance_. The unity of the two not only ceases to be a matter of self-evidence, it ceases even to be a possibility. The feeling of significance is a living feeling and, like everything else belonging with Time and Destiny, it is uniquely occurring and non-recurring. No sign, however well known and habitually used, is ever repeated with exactly the same connotation; and hence it is that originally no sign ever recurred in the same form. The domain of the rigid sign is unconditionally one of things-become of the pure extended; it is _not an organism, but a system_, which possesses its own _causal_ logic and brings the irreconcilable opposition of space and time, intellect and mood, also into the waking connexions of two beings. This fixed stock of signs and motives, with its ostensibly fixed meanings, must be acquired by learning and practice if one wishes to belong to the community of waking-consciousness with which it is associated. _The necessary concomitant of speech divorced from speaking is the notion of the school._ This is fully developed in the higher animals; and in every self-contained religion, every art, every society, it is presupposed as the background of the believer, the artist, the “well-brought-up” human being. And from this point each community has its sharply defined frontier; to be a member one must know its language--i.e., its articles of faith, its ethics, its rules. In counterpoint and Catholicism alike, bliss is not to be compassed by mere feeling and goodwill. Culture means a hitherto unimagined intensification of the depth and strictness of the form-language in every department; for each individual belonging to it, it consists--as his _personal_ Culture, religious, ethical, social, artistic--in a lifelong process of education and training _for_ this life. And consequently in all great arts, in the great Churches, mysteries and orders, there is reached such a command of form as astonishes the human being himself, and ends by breaking itself under the stress of its own exigences--whereupon, in every Culture alike, there is set up (expressly or tacitly) the slogan of a “return to nature.” This _maestria_ extends also to verbal language. Side by side with the social polish of the period of the Tyrannis or of the troubadours,