tual
representation. When we think, we are obliged to set out, whether we
know it not and whether we will or not, from what has been thought by
others who came before us and who environ us. Thought is an inheritance.
Kant thought in German, and into German he translated Hume and Rousseau,
who thought in English and French respectively. And did not Spinoza
think in Judeo-Portuguese, obstructed by and contending with Dutch?

Thought rests upon prejudgements, and prejudgements pass into language.
To language Bacon rightly ascribed not a few of the errors of the _idola
fori_. But is it possible to philosophize in pure algebra or even in
Esperanto? In order to see the result of such an attempt one has only to
read the work of Avenarius on the criticism of pure experience (_reine
Erfahrung_), of this prehuman or inhuman experience. And even Avenarius,
who was obliged to invent a language, invented one that was based upon
the Latin tradition, with roots which carry in their metaphorical
implications a content of impure experience, of human social experience.

All philosophy is, therefore, at bottom philology. And philology, with
its great and fruitful law of analogical formations, opens wide the door
to chance, to the irrational, to the absolutely incommensurable. History
is not mathematics, neither is philosophy. And how many philosophical
ideas are not strictly owing to something akin to rhyme, to the
necessity of rightly placing a consonant! In Kant himself there is a
great deal of this, of esthetic symmetry, rhyme.

Representation is, therefore, like language, like reason itself--which
is simply internal language--a social and racial product, and race, the
blood of the spirit, is language, as Oliver Wendell Holmes has said, and
as I have often repeated.

It was in Athens and with Socrates that our Western philosophy first
became mature, conscious of itself, and it arrived at this consciousness
by means of the dialogue, of social conversation. And it is profoundly
significant that the doctrine of innate ideas, of the objective and
normative value of ideas, of what Scholasticism afterwards knew as
Realism, should have formulated itself in dialogues. And these ideas,
which constitute reality, are names, as Nominalism showed. Not that they
may not be more than names (_flatus vocis_), but that they are nothing
less than names. Language is that which gives us reality, and not as a
mere vehicle of reality, but as its true fles