ABSTRACT
Martin Buber tells that language develops out of primary words. These are not isolated words but combined words; and they do not signify things but intimate what he calls relations. Of these primary words there are only two: the combined word I-Thou; and the combined word I-It. Each of these expresses one aspect of man's two-fold attitude to the world, and in accordance with this two-fold attitude the world is a two-fold world to him. The word I-Thou belongs to the language of what Buber calls relation or standing in relation. This is not a merely cognitive relation, but a relation of life, a relation of living subjects to one another. Those who regard the ecstatic union of the mystics as a fusion or absorption concentrate on the living relation and forget the I and Thou without which there would be no relation at all.
