Chapter XVIII: Ideography

The imagination is stimulated and developed by the sense of sight more than by any other sense, perhaps more than by all of the other senses combined. The American Indians, and probably all savages, are remarkable for acute and critical vision, and also for their retentive memory of what they have once seen. When significance is once attached to an object seen, it will always be recalled, though often with false deductions. Therefore, like deaf-mutes, who depend mainly on sight, the American Indians have developed great facility in communicating by signs, and also in expressing their ideas in pictures which are ideographic though seldom artistic. This tendency has likewise affected their spoken languages. Their terms express with wonderful particularity the characters and relations of visible objects, and their speeches, which are in a high degree metaphoric, become so by the figurative presentation in words of such objects accompanied generally by imitative signs for them, and often by their bodily exhibition.

The statement once made that the aboriginal languages of North America are not capable of expressing abstract ideas is incorrect, but the tendency to use tangible and visible forms for such ideas is apparent. This practice was most marked in reference to religious subjects, which were often presented under the veil of symbols, as has been the common expedient of most peoples who have emerged from the very lowest known stages of human culture, but have not attained the highest.

Many instances appear in this work in which pictures expressive of an idea present more than mere portraitures of objects, which latter method has been styled imitative or iconographic writing.

It is, however, impossible to classify with scientific precision the pictured ideograms collected, for the reason that many of them occupy intermediate points in any scheme that would be succinct enough to be practically useful. In the arrangement of the present chapter the division is made into: 1st. Abstract ideas expressed pictorially. 2d. Signs, symbols, and emblems. 3d. Significance of colors. 4th. Gesture and posture signs depicted. When any of the graphic representations of ideas have become successful, i. e., commonly adopted, it soon becomes more or less conventionalized. Chapter XIX is devoted specially to that branch of the general subject.