In logic and psychology, signs and language are usually foisted in
somewhere as an appendix, without any trouble being taken to display their
necessity and systematic place in the economy of intelligence. The right
place for the sign is that just given: where intelligence—which as
intuiting generates the form of time and space, but is apparently
recipient of sensible matter, out of which it forms ideas—now gives its
own original ideas a definite existence from itself, treating the
intuition (or time and space as filled full) as its own property, deleting
the connotation which properly and naturally belongs to it, and conferring
on it an other connotation as its soul and import. This sign-creating
activity may be distinctively named “productive” Memory (the primarily
abstract “Mnemosyne”); since memory, which in ordinary life is often used
as interchangeable and synonymous with remembrance (recollection), and
even with conception and imagination, has always to do with signs only.
§ 459. The intuition—in its natural phase a something given and given in
space—acquires, when employed as a sign, the peculiar characteristic of
existing only as superseded and sublimated. Such is the negativity of
intelligence; and thus the truer phase of the intuition used as a sign is
existence in _time_ (but its existence vanishes in the moment of being),
and if we consider the rest of its external psychical quality, its
_institution_ by intelligence, but an institution growing out of its
(anthropological) own naturalness. This institution of the natural is the
vocal note, where the inward idea manifests itself in adequate utterance.
The vocal note which receives further articulation to express specific
ideas—speech and, its system, language—gives to sensations, intuitions,
conceptions, a second and higher existence than they naturally
possess,—invests them with the right of existence in the ideational realm.