 In Paris, Humboldt completed his major work on aesthetics, his Aesthetische Versuche I. Ueber Goethes Herrman und Dorothea (Essays in Aesthetics I. On Goethe’s Herrmann und Dorothea) in 1799. In the same year he also published in French for the benefit of Madame de Staël and her circle a concise summary of its major arguments with emphasis on his new theory of the imagination in the Parisian journal Magasin Encyclopédique. A decisive turning point in his intellectual career occurred with his discovery and pioneering investigations of the Basque language, an idiom whose origin and structure had defied hitherto all attempts at an explanation by historians, philosophers and linguists following conventional methodologies. He disproved all existing theories about its descent and affiliation but instead of advancing new theories he decided first to set out to study the language itself using all possible means at his disposal, from written documents, native informants, statistics, historical, ethnological and sociological information to inventing and actually conducting what is known today as “field work”. His Basque studies coincided with his formulation of a new conception of language questioning and defying the representational view of language that had been dominant in Western thinking from Aristotle all the way to the empiricist and rationalist thinkers of his day. This new conception would find its expression in Humboldt’s philosophy of language and linguistics that from this moment on became of central concern to him.