 If music does not deal with the world as we know it from ordinary perception, but rather with a transcendent reality, then language will fail to describe music effectively. This is what we could call the ineffability thesis, which emerges in various forms in the writings of Romantic philosophers, critics, and musicians. The view is conveyed not so much by the weak claim that we do not currently have words to name what music means or expresses, but rather by the stronger claim that we could not possibly find them. While it is perhaps Arthur Schopenhauer who is responsible for the most influential philosophical account of ineffability (see following section), the composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) gives the ineffability thesis its most famous formulation when he states that