About the time when Schleiermacher was meditating on the nature of the æsthetic fact, a movement of thought was gaining ground in Germany which, tending as it did to overthrow the old concept of language, might have proved a powerful aid to æsthetic science. But not only had the æsthetic specialists--if we may so call them--no notion of the existence of this movement, the new philosophers of language never brought their ideas into relation with the æsthetic problem, and their discoveries languished imprisoned within the narrow scope of Linguistic, condemned to sterility. [Sidenote: _Linguistic speculation at the beginning of the nineteenth century_.] Research into the relations between thought and speech, between the unity of logic and the multiplicity of languages, had been promoted, like many other things, by the _Critique of Pure Reason_: the earliest Kantians often tried to apply the Kantian categories of intuition (space and time) and of intellect to language. The first to make the attempt was Roth[1] in 1795; the same who wrote an essay twenty years later on _Pure Linguistic._ Many other noteworthy books on this subject appeared in quick succession: those of Vater, Bernhardi, Reinbeck and Koch were published one after another in the first ten years of the nineteenth century. In all these treatises the dominating subject is the difference between language and languages; between the universal language, corresponding with Logic, and concrete, historical languages disturbed by feeling and imagination or whatever other name was applied to the psychological element of differentiation. Vater distinguishes a general Linguistic (_all gemeine Sprachlehre_), constructed _a priori_ by means of the analysis of the concepts contained in the judgement, from a comparative Linguistic (_vergleichende Sprachlehre_) which attempts by means of induction to reach probable laws through the study of a number of languages. Bemhardi considers language to be an "allegory of intellect" and distinguishes it as functioning either as the organ of poetry or that of science. Reinbeck speaks of an Æsthetic Grammar and a Logical. Koch, more energetic than the others, asserts positively that the character of language is "_non ad Logices sed ad Psychologiae rationem revocanda._"[2] Some few philosophers speculated on language and mythology: for example Schelling considered them to be the products of a pre-human consciousness (_vormenschliche Bewusstsein,_) presenting them, in a fantastic allegory, as diabolic suggestions which precipitate the ego from the infinite to the finite.[3] [Sidenote: _Wilhelm von Humboldt. Relics of intellectualism._]