Nicole’s acute remark: “Men do not feel weariness from what they think, but because they do not think enough.” SPEECH When the members of the human family began to use the _clamor concomitans_ which accompanied their occupations, as _clamor significans_, these simple materials formed the roots which indicated such and such acts, and produced verbal and nominatival bases composed of predicative and demonstrative elements. During the course of ages the first became conjugated and the second were declined. By means of adding the successive acts together, and retaining them united in the mind, or subtracting in several directions, our ancestors diversified the meaning of all the primitive roots; they formed collective and abstract nouns in their simplest form by combination. The process never varied; thus the thought progressed from the first root to the last concept. But the first word ever pronounced by a human creature was a true proposition, and our last literary chef-d’œuvre consists of a series of propositions. Descartes’ brief phrase “Cogito, ergo sum” may be better rendered and still more briefly by one word. The Greek word Logos, meaning word and thought combined, had originally, as I have already remarked, the two meanings of assembling and combining. “Cogito” = I think, which is the short for co-agito = I assemble. The act of assembling presupposes that of separating, seeing that it is impossible to combine two or more things without at the same time separating them from other things. The child who is taught the first rules of arithmetic adds and subtracts, which can only be done by combining and separating. However little intelligence he may have, his task does not present great difficulties to him; and yet the most abstruse mathematical problem consists in adding and subtracting, and the most astounding calculations of Newton, and the most profound mathematical speculations of Kant, are but the results of addition and subtraction, of combining and separating.