ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the importance of language in eighteenth-century intellectual life derived from the commonly held assumption that our possession of it helped to explain our unique characteristics as a species. The philosophers, the anthropologists, and the natural historians of the Enlightenment saw language as the key to understanding the peculiar power and progress of the human mind. The Enlightenment conception of the relation between language and reason moves decisively away from the pre-modern preoccupation with the discovery of affinity or resemblance. The chapter also argues that Hans Aarsleff is wrong to assert that Locke and Condillac are in complete agreement about the origin of language, even though, in the end, Condillac does not succeed in demonstrating how language could have been acquired solely on the basis of sensation. Condillac assumes that original language must have arisen from spontaneous expressions of primal feelings, which is to say expressions of pleasure, pain, fear and anger.
