Whate'er of us lives in the hearts of others Is our truest and profoundest self. - Johann Gottfried Herder

The nature of man remains ever the same: in the ten thousandth year of the World he will be born with passions, as he was born with passions in the two thousandth, and ran through his course of follies to a late, imperfect, useless wisdom. We wander in a labyrinth, in which our lives occupy but a span; so that it is to us nearly a matter of indifference, whether there be any entrance or outlet to the intricate path.

Herder (1803) objected that "the pains that have been taken, to make of all the people of the earth, according to this genealogy, descendants of the Hebrew, and half-brothers of the Jews, are contrary not only to chronology and universal history but to the true point of view of the narrative itself." As far as he was concerned, "the central point of the largest quarter of the Globe, the primitive mountains of Asia, prepared the first abode of the human race" (517-18).

As long as we keep our native language on our tongue, we will penetrate so much more deeply the distinctiveness of each language. Here we will find gaps, there superfluity; here riches, there a desert, and we will be able to enrich the poverty of the one with the treasures of the other. For, in what precise relationship do language and mentality stand? Whoever masters the entire scope of one language surveys a field full of thoughts, and whoever learns to express himself precisely in it thereby gathers for himself a treasure of clear concepts. The first words we stammer are the foundation stones of our knowing, and our nurse-maids are our first teachers of logic.