 According to Leibniz, natural language, despite its powerful resources for communication, often makes reasoning obscure since it is an imperfect mirror of intelligible thoughts. As a result, it is often difficult to reason with the apparatus of natural language, “since it is full of innumerable equivocations” (On the Universal Science: Characteristic (undated); G VII, 205/S 18). Perhaps this is because of his view that the terms of natural language stand for complex, or derivative, concepts—concepts which are composed of, and reducible to, simpler concepts. With this “combinatorial” view of concepts in hand, Leibniz notices “that all human ideas can be resolved into a few as their primitives” (On the Universal Science: Characteristic; G VII, 205/S 18). We could then assign symbols, or “characters,” to these primitive concepts from which we could form characters for derivative concepts by means of combinations of the symbols. As a result, Leibniz tells us, “it would be possible to find correct definitions and values and, hence, also the properties which are demonstrably implied in the definitions” (On the Universal Science: Characteristic; G VII, 205/S 19). The totality of these symbols would form a “universal characteristic,” an ideal language in which all human concepts would be perfectly represented, and their constitutive nature perfectly transparent. Now it is true that Leibniz eventually came to doubt “whether any concept of this [primitive] kind appears distinctly to men, namely, in such a way that they know they have it” (An Introduction to a Secret Encyclopedia (1679?); C 513/MP 7). But it is also clear that he did not see this skepticism concerning our ability to reach the primitive concepts as much of a barrier to the project of a universal language. He writes in The Art of Discovery (1685) that “there are certain primitive terms which can be posited, if not absolutely, at least relatively to us” (C 176/W 51). The suggestion seems to be that even if we cannot provide a catalog of absolutely primitive concepts, we can nevertheless construct a characteristic based on concepts which cannot be further resolved by humans.