the listener; and this capacity is called Reason (Vernunft).

Such is the interpretation that all peoples, ages, and languages have put on the word Reason.

It has always been understood to mean the possession of general, abstract, non-intuitive ideas, named concepts, which are denoted and fixed by means of words. This faculty alone it is which in reality gives to men their advantage over animals. For these abstract ideas, or concepts, that is, mental impressions formed of the sum of many separate things, are the condition of language and through it of actual thought; through which again they determine the consciousness not only of the present (which animals also have), but of the past and the future as such; whence it results that they are the modulus, so to say, of clear