The gutenberg galaxy 125 But we can learn much about print from the Chinese attitude towards it. For the most obvious character of print is repetition, just as the obvious effect of repetition is hypnosis or obsession. Moreover, printing ideograms is totally different from typography based on the phonetic alphabet. For the ideograph even more than the hieroglyph is a complex Gestalt involving all of the senses at once. The ideogram affords none of the separation and specialization of sense, none of the breaking apart of sight and sound and meaning which is the key to the phonetic alphabet. So that the numerous specializations and separations of function inherent in industry and applied knowledge simply were not accessible to the Chinese. Today they appear to be proceeding along the lines of the phonetic alphabet. This ensures that they will liquidate their present and traditional culture in toto. They will then proceed by the paths of schizophrenia and multiply dichotomies in the direction of physical power and aggressive organization, on a centre-margin or Roman pattern. The quite irrelevant ground that Carothers assigns to explaining the earlier Chinese indifference to industrialism is that Chinese writing—or printing—requires much erudition for its understanding. The same is true in varying degrees of all non-alphabetic forms of writing. The comment of Latourette on this point will help here as well as later: The greater part of the voluminous literature in Chinese has been written in the classical style… The Chinese classical language presents difficulties. It is highly artificial. It is often replete with allusions and quotations and to appreciate and even to understand much of it the reader has to bring to it a vast store of knowledge of existing literature… It is only by going through a prodigious amount of literature and especially by memorising quantities of it that the scholar obtains a kind of sixth sense which enables him to divine which of several readings is correct. Even the perusal of the classical language, therefore, requires long preparation. Composition is still more of a task. Few Occidentals have achieved an acceptable style and many a modern Chinese who is the finished product of the present-day curriculum is far from adept. The concluding observation of Carothers is that genetic studies of human groups offer no certainty and very small data, indeed, compared to cultural and environmental approaches. My suggestion is that cultural ecology has a reasonably stable base in the human sensorium, and that any extension of the sensorium by technological dilation has a quite appreciable effect in setting up new ratios or proportions among all the senses. Languages being that form of technology constituted by dilation or uttering (outering) of all of our senses at once, are themselves