May the attempt be made, thus early, to write a morphology of the Culture-languages? Certainly, science has not as yet even discovered that there is such a task. Culture-languages are languages of _historical_ men. Their Destiny accomplishes itself not in biological spaces of time, but in step with the organic evolution of strictly limited lifetimes. _Culture languages are historical languages_, which means, primarily, that there is no historical event and no political institution that will not have been determined in part by the spirit of the language employed in it and, conversely, that will not have its influence upon the spiritual form of that language. The build of the Latin sentence is yet another consequence of Rome’s battles, which in giving her conquests compelled the nation as a whole to think administratively; German prose bears traces even to-day of the Thirty Years’ War in its want of established norms, and early Christian dogma would have acquired a different shape if the oldest Scriptures, instead of being one and all written in Greek, and been set down in Syriac form like those of the Mandæans. But secondarily it means that world-history is dependent--to a degree that students have hitherto scarcely imagined--_upon the existence of script as the essentially historical means of communication_. The State (in the higher sense of the word) presupposes intercourse by writing; the style of all politics is determined absolutely by the significance that the politico-historical thought of the nation attaches in each instance to charters and archives, to signatures, to the products of the publicist; the battle of legislation is a fight for or against a written law; constitutions replace material force by the composition of paragraphs and elevate a piece of writing to the dignity of a weapon. Speech belongs with the present, and writing with duration, but equally, oral understanding pairs with practical experience, and writing with theoretical thought. The bulk of the inner political history of all Late periods can be traced back to this opposition. The ever-varying facts resist the “letter,” while _truths demand it_--that is the world-historical opposition of two parties that in one form or another is met with in the great crises of all Cultures. The one lives in actuality, the other flourishes a text in its face; all great revolutions presuppose a literature.