ABSTRACT
The ideal isolation and breaking-up of actuality, its logical separation into different divisions, is one of the favourite devices of thought; a complex, in reality inseparable, is split up into ideal elements and parts, and each of these ideal elements is then treated in isolation. Methodological interest attaches to the controversy between Curtius and Pott as to whether the roots that are assumed by comparative philologists ever really existed as such without flexions and transformations. Whether there ever was a period in which the roots postulated by the grammarians were actually used or whether. these roots were only a generalized abstraction from the so-called derivations. In the first sense the fiction has a certain ethical value; as used by Leibniz the extent of its significance is dependent on the value of the theory of monads itself.
