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Before any explanation is attempted, mention must also be made of a further stage in this unintelligible behaviour of the Egyptian language. ‘Of all the eccentricities of the Egyptian vocabulary perhaps the most extraordinary feature is that, quite apart from the words that combine antithetical meanings, it possesses other compound words in which two vocables of antithetical meanings are united so as to form a compound which bears the meaning of only one of its two constituents. Thus in this extraordinary language there are not only words meaning equally "strong" or "weak", and "command" or "obey"; but there are also compounds like "old-young", "far-near", "bind-sever", "outside-inside" . . . which, in spite of combining the extremes of difference, mean only "young", "near", "bind" and "inside" respectively       So that in these compound words contradictory concepts have been quite intentionally combined, not in order to produce a third concept, as occasionally happens in Chinese, but only in order to use the compound to express the meaning of one of its contradictory parts - a part which would have had the same meaning by itself . . .’

However, the riddle is easier to solve than it appears to be. Our concepts owe their existence to comparisons. ‘If it were always light we should not be able to distinguish light from dark, and consequently we should not be able to have either the concept of light or the word for it . . .’ ‘It is clear that everything on this planet is relative and has an independent existence only in so far as it is differentiated in respect of its relations to other things . . .’ Since every concept is in this way the twin of its contrary, how could it be first thought of and how could it be communicated to other people who were trying to conceive it, other than by being measured against its contrary . . .’ (Ibid., 15): ‘Since the concept of strength could not be formed except as a contrary to weakness, the word denoting "strong" contained a simultaneous recollection of "weak", as the thing by means of which it first came into existence. In reality this word denoted neither "strong" nor "weak", but the relation and difference between the two, which created both of them equally . . .’ ‘Man was not in fact able to acquire his oldest and simplest concepts except as contraries to their contraries, and only learnt by degrees to separate the two sides of an antithesis and think of one without conscious comparison with the other.’