 Though Marty did, as already indicated, focus much of his work on the description of language as it is, his first book On the Origin of Language (Marty 1875) was concerned with its origin. In this book, Marty already applies some of the main ideas of his later descriptive semasiology (see the following section) to refute two opposing views on the origin of language – nativism and empiricism – and to establish his own alternative, more teologically oriented explanation of the beginnings of language. “Nativism” was represented especially by Heymann Steinthal, Moritz Lazarus, and Wilhelm Wundt, (See also the lengthy appendix against Wundt in Marty 1908a, 543–738) – and goes back to Wilhelm Humboldt’s concept of unconscious and inborn language instinct and to his view of the essential relation of thinking to speaking. Nativism claims that language develops out of sound-producing reflexes and associations of these sounds with certain sensations and images. Thus, on the nativist view, language as the purposeful manifestation of inner life arose from behavior which was originally altogether unintended (Marty 1875, 19). In other words, language is originally “native” and not something created or “invented” in human conscious activity. “Empiricism”, represented by Herbart, Grimm, Lotze, and Whitney, denies necessary connection of thinking to speaking as well as all inborn relations between certain thoughts and certain articulated sounds (Marty 1875, 44–45). Marty cannot accept nativism for the complete lack of empirical evidence in its favor and discusses many conceptual confusions on its part (Marty 1875, 18–43). While he feels much more at home in the camp of empiricism and shares its critical stance toward nativism, he insists that language is teleological in character rather than mechanistic and is of course supported by the psychology of intentionality. Marty maintains that language originated from the basic human need to communicate and cooperate and was purposeful from the outset. This need motivated conscious, but unplanned and unreflected formation of syntactic forms and lexical means for purposeful externalization of inner life through articulated signs. Moreover, he uses associative mechanisms to explain origins of syntactic forms of language and to describe how new syntactic forms and vocabulary were suggested and brought about by using already established meanings of expressions in new contexts (see also the explanation of Marty’s concept of inner form below). Marty later published a series of ten articles “On Speech Reflex, Nativism, and Purposeful Formation of Language” (Marty 1884b, Marty 1886, Marty 1889, Marty 1890, Marty 1891, Marty 1892a) in which he continued to defend his this view and engaged in extensive polemics against new formulations of the opposing views. These views were in large measure developed out of Herbartian psychological theories and also meshed in with the whole program of a “psychology of peoples” (Völkerpsychologie). Much of the psychology, including alleged observations of children and so-called primitive people, used to support nativism is on his view highly erroneous. Marty’s defense of his theory in opposition to nativism involves descriptive semasiology, which was to be developed more fully in his subsequent writings, especially his main work, and is indeed the center piece of his philosophical endeavors.