§9 Concepts form a distinct class of ideas, existing only in the mind of man, and entirely different from the ideas of perception which we have considered up till now. We can therefore never attain to a sensuous and, properly speaking, evident knowledge of their nature, but only to a knowledge which is abstract and discursive. It would, therefore, be absurd to demand that they should be verified in experience, if by experience is meant the real external world, which consists of ideas of perception, or that they should be brought before the eyes or the imagination like objects of perception. They can only be thought, not perceived, and only the effects which men accomplish through them are properly objects of experience. Such effects are language, preconceived and planned action and science, and all that results from these. [pg 051] Speech, as an object of outer experience, is obviously nothing more than a very complete telegraph, which communicates arbitrary signs with the greatest rapidity and the finest distinctions of difference. But what do these signs mean? How are they interpreted? When some one speaks, do we at once translate his words into pictures of the fancy, which instantaneously flash upon us, arrange and link themselves together, and assume form and colour according to the words that are poured forth, and their grammatical inflections? What a tumult there would be in our brains while we listened to a speech, or to the reading of a book? But what actually happens is not this at all. The meaning of a speech is, as a rule, immediately grasped, accurately and distinctly taken in, without the imagination being brought into play. It is reason which speaks to reason, keeping within its own province. It communicates and receives abstract conceptions, ideas that cannot be presented in perceptions, which are framed once for all, and are relatively few in number, but which yet encompass, contain, and represent all the innumerable objects of the actual world. This itself is sufficient to prove that the lower animals can never learn to speak or comprehend, although they have the organs of speech and ideas of perception in common with us. But because words represent this perfectly distinct class of ideas, whose subjective correlative is reason, they are without sense and meaning for the brutes. Thus language, like every other manifestation which we ascribe to reason, and like everything which distinguishes man from the brutes, is to be explained from this as its one simple source—conceptions, abstract ideas which cannot be presented in perception, but are general, and have no individual existence in space and time. Only in single cases do we pass from the conception to the perception, do we construct images as representatives of concepts in perception, to which, however, they are never adequate. These cases [pg 052] are fully discussed in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, § 28, and therefore I shall not repeat my explanation here. It may be compared, however, with what is said by Hume in the twelfth of his"Philosophical Essays," p. 244, and by Herder in the "Metacritik,"pt. i. p. 274 (an otherwise worthless book). The Platonic idea, the possibility of which depends upon the union of imagination and reason, is the principal subject of the third book of this work.