 In his Letters on Poetry… from 1795, addressed to a fictional Amalie, Schlegel discusses the origins of language; a theme, to which he would later return in his Jena and Berlin lectures. Schlegel was thus resuming an old philosophical debate which had formed two opposite hypotheses (Behler 2002: 124–128). The two basic and mutually exclusive positions maintained, on the one hand, as Schlegel portrays them, that human language must have originated as a transcription, representation, or imitation of external objects; and, on the other, that in its origin language must have been purely sensual, i.e., a mere form of expression of emotions through sounds. Thus, either directly or indirectly, Schlegel was referring to authors such as Condillac, Hemsterhuys, Karl Phillip Moritz, August Ferdinand Bernhardi, Fichte, Herder, and Rousseau. However, in contrast to Herder (and even his own brother Friedrich) for whom the debate about the origin of language was primarily a debate about whether its origin was natural or divine, for Schlegel, the real question at stake was the extent to which the nature of language could be reduced to and explained in pure rationalistic terms. Furthermore, in these letters Schlegel implicitly questions the possibility of attaining absolute knowledge solely through theory, i.e., attending only to a scientific rationale that necessarily excludes more metaphorical and intuitive approaches, which attempt to understand and grasp things “under the mysterious light of twilight” (SW: VII, 110). For Schlegel, in any case, the real problem lay in the assumed exclusivity of both alternatives (cf. Behler 2000: 126). 