Conclusion

Abstract

“What is an idea?” Voltaire asked rhetorically in his Philosophical Dictionary. “It is an image painted in my brain … ideas are nothing but the consequences of all the objects I have perceived …. I have ideas only because I have images.” The idea as a representative image of the thing, this was the view everywhere accepted in the eighteenth century. Representation served as the foundation of all knowledge, while “observation”, so much revered in any discussion of method, clarified the representation, enhancing the precision and accuracy of the reproduction. The foundation of language, however, and the awakening of reflective thought rested on the duplicated representation of the arbitrary sign. Whereas the representation fulfilled its purpose precisely to the extent that it provided an accurate reproduction of the thing, this duplicated representation was valued for its very artificiality, for its detachment. Its function could hardly have been more clearly expressed than in Bonnet’s formulation, “the more indeterminate the sign, the more it is a sign; for it has greater representative capacity”.