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 flesh, of which all the rest, dumb or inarticulate representation, is merely the skeleton.  And thus logic operates upon esthetics, the concept upon the expression, upon the word, and not upon the brute perception.

And this is true even in the matter of love.  Love does not discover that it is love until it speaks, until it says, I love thee!  In Stendhal’s novel, La Chartreuse de Parme, it is with a very profound intuition that Count Mosca, furious with jealousy because of the love which he believes unites the Duchess of Sanseverina with his nephew Fabrice, is made to say, “I must be calm; if my manner is violent the duchess, simply because her vanity is piqued, is capable of following Belgirate, and then, during the journey, chance may lead to a word which will give a name to the feelings they bear towards each other, and thereupon in a moment all the consequences will follow.”

Even so—­all things were made by the word, and the word was in the beginning.

Thought, reason—­that is, living language—­is an inheritance, and the solitary thinker of Aben Tofail, the Arab philosopher of Guadix, is as absurd as the ego of Descartes.  The real and concrete truth, not the methodical and ideal, is:  homo sum, ergo cogito.  To feel oneself a man is more immediate than to think.  But, on the other hand, History, the process of culture, finds its perfection and complete effectivity only in the individual; the end of History and Humanity is man, each man, each individual. Homo sum, ergo cogito; cogito ut sim Michael de Unamuno.  The individual is the end of the Universe.