Goethe says in _Wilhelm Meister_: “Few Germans, and perhaps few men of modern nations, have the sense of an æsthetic whole. We only know how to praise and blame details, we can only show a fragmentary admiration.” Footnote 117: _Cf._ W. von Humboldt, _Über die Kawi-Sprache_, Introduction, p. xcv: “We may call the sound that imitates the meaning of a word _symbolic_, although the symbolic element in speech goes far deeper than this.... This kind of imitation undoubtedly had a great, and perhaps exclusive, influence over the early attempts at word-building.” Footnote 118: There is probably another jargon of the same kind as Balaïbalan. This is called “Afnskoë,” and is spoken by the pedlars and horse-dealers of Greater Russia, especially in the province of Vladimir. It is confined to men. The grammar is entirely Russian, though the roots are foreign. (_See_ Pott, Ersch and Gruber’s _Encyclopädie, Indogermanischer Sprachstamm_, p. 110.) Footnote 119: C. O. Müller, in an admirable passage which I cannot resist the temptation of transcribing, shows the true nature of language: “Our age has learnt, by the study of the Hindu and especially the Germanic languages, that the laws of speech are as fixed as those of organic life. Between different dialects, developing independently after their separation, there are still mysterious links, which reciprocally determine the sounds and their sequences. Literature and science set limits to this growth, and arrest perhaps some of its richer developments; but they cannot impose any law on it higher than that ordained by nature, mother of all things. Even a long time before the coming of decadence and bad taste, languages may fall sick, from outward or inward causes, and suffer vast changes; but so long as life remains in them, their innate power is enough to heal their wounds, to set their torn limbs, and to restore unity and regularity, even when the beauty and perfection of the noble plants has almost entirely disappeared” (_Die Etrusker_, p. 65). Footnote 120: Pott, _op. cit._, p. 74. Footnote 121: That the mixture of idioms is proportionate to that of the races constituting a nation had already been noticed before philology, in the modern sense, existed at all. Kämpfer for example says in his “History of Japan” (published in 1729): “We may take it as a fixed rule that the settlement of foreigners in a country will bring a corresponding proportion of foreign words into the language; these will be naturalized by degrees, and become as familiar as the native words themselves.” Footnote 122: Keferstein shows that German is merely a hybrid language made up of Celtic and Gothic (_Ansichten über die keltischen Altertümer_, Halle, 1846–51; Introduction, p. xxxviii). Grimm is of the same opinion. Footnote 123: