The written language of Egypt is already by 3000 in a state of rapid grammatical decomposition; likewise the Sumerian literary languages called _eme-sal_ (women’s language). The written language of China--which _vis-à-vis_ the vernaculars of the Chinese world has long formed a language apart--is, even in the oldest known texts, so entirely inflexionless that only recent research has established that it ever had inflexions at all.[195] The Indogermanic system is known to us only in a state of complete break-down. Of the Case in Old Vedic (about 1500 B.C.) the Classical languages a thousand years later retained only fragments.[196] From Alexander the Great’s time the dual disappeared from the declension of ordinary Hellenistic Greek, and the passive vanished from the conjugation entirely. The Western languages, although of the most miscellaneous provenance imaginable--the Germanic from primitive and the Romanic from highly civilized stock--modify in the same direction, the Romanic cases having become reduced to one, and the English, after the Reformation, to zero. Ordinary German definitely shed the genitive at the beginning of the nineteenth century and is now in process of abolishing the dative. Only after trying to translate a piece of difficult and pregnant prose--say of Tacitus or Mommsen--“back”[197] into some very ancient language rich in inflexions does one realize how meantime the technique of signs has vaporized into a technique of thoughts, which now only needs to employ the signs--abbreviated, but replete with meaning--merely as the counters in a game that only the initiates of the particular speech-communion understand. This is why to a west-European, the sacred Chinese texts must always be in the fullest sense a sealed book; but the same holds good also for the primary words of every other Culture-language--the Greek λογός and ἀρχή, the Sanskrit _Atman_ and _Braman_--indications of the world-outlook of their respective Cultures that no one not bred in the Culture can comprehend. The external history of languages is as good as lost to us in just its most important parts. Its springtime lies deep in the primitive era, in which (to repeat what has been said earlier), we have to imagine “humanity” in the form of scattered and quite small troops, lost in the wide spaces of the earth. A spiritual change came when reciprocal contacts became habitual (and eventually natural) to them, but correspondingly there can be no doubt that this contact was first sought for and then regulated, or fended off, by means of speech, and that it was the impression of an earth filled with men that first brought the waking-consciousness to the point of tense intelligent shrewdness, forcing verbal language under pressure to the surface. So that, perhaps, the birth of grammar is connected with the race hall-mark of the grand Number.