Note 371 — Chapter IX · SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING

Primitive languages afford no foundations for abstract ordered thought. But at the beginning of every Culture an inner change takes place in the language that makes it adequate for carrying the highest symbolic tasks of the ensuing cultural development. Thus it was simultaneously with the Romanesque style that English and German arose out of the Teutonic languages of the Frankish period, and French, Italian and Spanish out of the “lingua rustica” of the old Roman provinces—languages of identical metaphysical content though so dissimilar in origin.