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Diversity in Oneness 519revive with this new stamp and influence upon it. Latin, afterits first century of general domination in the West, became adead thing, impotent for creation, and generated no new orliving and evolving culture in the nations that spoke it; even sogreat a force as Christianity could not give it a new life. Thetimes during which it was an instrument of European thought,were precisely those in which that thought was heaviest, mosttraditional and least fruitful. A rapid and vigorous new life onlygrew up when the languages which appeared out of the detritusof dying Latin or the old languages which had not been lost tookits place as the complete instruments of national culture. For itis not enough that the natural language should be spoken by thepeople; it must be the expression of its higher life and thought.A language that survives only as a patois or a provincial tonguelike Welsh after the English conquest or Breton or Provençal inFrance or as Czech survived once in Austria or Ruthenian andLithuanian in imperial Russia, languishes, becomes sterile anddoes not serve all the true purpose of survival.Language is the sign of the cultural life of a people, theindex of its soul in thought and mind that stands behind andenriches its soul in action. Therefore it is here that the phenomenaand utilities of diversity may be most readily seized, morethan in mere outward things; but these truths are importantbecause they apply equally to the thing which it expresses andsymbolises and serves as an instrument. Diversity of languageis worth keeping because diversity of cultures and differentiationof soul-groups are worth keeping and because without thatdiversity life cannot have full play; for in its absence there isa danger, almost an inevitability of decline and stagnation. Thedisappearance of national variation into a single uniform humanunity, of which the systematic thinker dreams as an ideal andwhich we have seen to be a substantial possibility and even alikelihood if a certain tendency becomes dominant, might leadto political peace, economic well-being, perfect administration,the solution of a hundred material problems, as did on a lesserscale the Roman unity in old times; but to what eventual goodif it leads also to an uncreative sterilisation of the mind and