craving to fertilize and be fertilized, cannot for all their bright splendour attract one another, or even see one another, but must have recourse to animals, for whom alone these colours and these scents exist. “Language” I call the entire free activity of the waking microcosm in so far as it brings something to expression _for others_. Plants have no waking-being, no capacity of being moved, and therefore no language. The waking-consciousness of animal existences, on the contrary, is through and through a speaking, whether individual acts are intended to tell or not, and even if the conscious or the unconscious purpose of the doing lies in a quite other direction. A peacock is indubitably speaking when he spreads his tail, but a kitten playing with a cotton-reel also speaks to us, unconsciously, through the quaint charm of its movements. Everyone knows the difference there is in one’s movements according as one is conscious or unconscious of being observed; one suddenly begins to speak, consciously, in all one’s actions. This, however, leads at once to the very significant distinction between two genera of language--the language which is only an _expression for the world_, an inward necessity springing from the longing inherent in all life to actualize itself before witnesses, to display its own presence to itself, and the language that is meant to be _understood by definite beings_. There are, therefore, _expression-languages_ and _communication-languages_. The former assume only a state of waking-being, the latter a connexion of waking-beings. To understand means to respond to the stimulus of a signal with one’s own feeling of its significance. To understand one another, to hold “conversation,” to speak to a “thou,” supposes, therefore, a sense of meanings in the other that corresponds to that in oneself. Expression-language before witnesses merely proves the presence of an “I,” but communication-language postulates a “thou.” The “I” is that which speaks, and the “thou” that which is meant to understand the speech of the “I.” For primitives a tree, a stone, or a cloud can be a “thou.” Every deity is a “thou.” In fairy-tales there is nothing that cannot hold converse with men, and we need only look at our own selves in moments of furious irritation or of poetic excitement to realize that anything can become a “thou” for us even to-day. And it is by some “thou” that we first came to the knowledge of an “I.” “I,” therefore, is a designation for the fact that a bridge exists to some other being.