In Being’s floods, in Action’s storm,
I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion!
Birth and Death,
An infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving
The fire of living.
’Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,
And weave the living Robe of Deity.

GOETHE, Song of the Earth-Spirit, Faust, 1774.

If pressed for an exact date of the true beginning of the scientific investigation of language, one would naturally think of the date of the publication of Johann Gottfried Herder’s prize essay on the Origin of Language, 1772. In passing from Rousseau’s essay to Herder’s—although they are separated by only twenty-two years, and by the distance between Paris and Strassburg—we step clearly over the threshold from medievalism into the new world of free philosophical investigation, into an atmosphere as clear as that in which Plato and Aristotle worked. Herder’s essay on language is the starting point for all the scientific work that has since been done on that subject, and has thus a very important historical significance in addition to its permanent scientific value. Its full significance, however, can be fully appreciated only in relation to the general scientific and philosophic thought of the time, and it will be necessary to digress for a few pages to describe the intellectual atmosphere in which Herder worked in the latter half of the eighteenth century in Germany.