• “Chinese writing was considered perfect insofar as with idiograms every element on the expression-plane corresponded to a semantic unit on the content-plane.  It was precisely these one-to-one correspondences that, for Kircher, deprived Chinese writing of its potential for mystery. . . An Egyptian hieroglyph showed its superiority by its ability to summon up entire ‘texts,’ and to express complex chunks of infinitely interpretable content” (SFPL: 161).