 Although many of Schlegel’s remarks may seem self-evident and elementary to translators today, they did not appear so at the time. In fact they are the result of a very precise way of understanding language. Schlegel’s translation theories are very much connected to his philosophy of language. It is within his explanatory observations about the difficulty of translating Sanskrit terms that we find a philosophical theory about the genealogy of abstract significance. All abstract concepts, he argues, are the result of a progressive growing apart between an original sensual denotation and its future abstract meanings (IB: II, 248–258). Therefore, the translator needs to make a decision between (a) finding a more or less neutral term in his own language that has a similar meaning to the original, sensual meaning (in this case he needs to explain the particular use of this word); and (b) using all the meanings that the original word has been attached to. The problem in the latter case is that one meaning does not relate to the other, and, what is worse, the translation loses the cohesion between all the different meanings, so the reader is not always able to know in which way these different meanings are bound.