Note 231 — Chapter VI · MAKROKOSMOS

And, finally, ornament in the highest sense includes script, and with it, the Book, which is the true associate of the cult-building, and as an art-work always appears and disappears with it. (See Vol. II, pp. 182. et seq., pp. 298 et seq.) In writing, it is understanding as distinct from intuition that attains to form: it is not essences that those signs symbolize but notions abstracted therefrom by words, and as for the speech-habituated human intellect rigid space is the presented objective, the writing of a Culture is (after its stone-building) the purest of all expressions of its prime-symbol. It is quite impossible to understand the history of Arabesque if we leave the innumerable Arabian scripts out of consideration, and it is no less impossible to separate Egyptian and Chinese style-history from the history of the corresponding writing-signs and their arrangement and application.