It is forever specifying, materializing, dealing in minutiae.

In the Egyptian symbolic alphabet there is a figure for a virgin, another for a married woman, for a widow without offspring, for a widow with one child, two children, and I know not in how many other circumstances, but for _woman_ there is no sign.

It must be so in the nature of things, for the symbol represents the object as it appears or is fancied to appear, and not as it is _thought_.

Furthermore, the constant learning by heart infallibly leads to slavish repetition and mental servility.
A symbol when understood is independent of language, and is as universally current as an Arabic numeral.

But this divorce of spoken and written language is of questionable advantage.