 Bhartṛhari’s argument can be thought of as an attack, on the adjective ‘non-verbal’ (avyapadeśyam) in the Nyāya definition of perception, aimed at their belief that for cognitive comprehension language is an inessential detail. For him, bare sense-impressions cannot count as awarenesses because they are nor effective enough, nothing is accomplished by them and, they do not result in appreciable mental activity. Bhartṛhari gives an example: a man walking along a village path to approach his house would invariably touch some grass on the road, and in some sense this would be tactile awareness at a pre-linguistic level (Vākyapadīya, Ch.1, verse 123). But this would not count as an awareness unless combined with the further ability to sort it out or verbalize it; consciousness cannot reveal an object to us unless we discriminate it, and the process of discrimination requires verbalization. What about a baby’s awareness, or that of a mute person, asks Vātsyāyana? Bhartṛhari points out that a baby’s sensations or a mute person’s awarenesses may still count as cognitive because they are linguistically potent. A pre-linguistic state of an infant can be cognitive if and only if it has speech potency, which is the cause of verbal language. So also, in the non-conceptual perceptual awareness (in adults and even some animals) speech-potency is latent; it is an essential trait of human consciousness and the defining characteristic of cognitive awareness (Vākyapadīya, Ch.1, verse 126). All knowledge of what is to be done in this world depends on speech-potential; even an infant has such knowledge due to residual traces from previous births (Vākyapadīya, Ch.1, verse 121). The initial sensory awareness of external objects which does not grasp any special features of them, nonetheless illuminates them in a non-specific manner as mere things by such expressions as ‘this’ or ‘that’ (Bhartṛhari; 123 and 124). Thus, insofar as the initial sensation is an awareness, it can be verbalized. The following analogy is offered as an argument for positing the presence of speech-seed (verbal disposition, as some modern philosophers call it) in pre-linguistic awareness: think about the experience of trying, but failing, to remember a verse heard before. Bhartṛhari claims that the entire verse exists in the cognitive faculty as speech-potency but because of lack of other contributory factors there is no verbalization. Similarly, a non-linguistic experience of a mute-person is an awareness because of the presence of verbal disposition or speech-seed even though there is no actualization of speech. There are no non-conceptual perceptions, because ordinary objects are not given to us without a concept (vikalpa) or some mode of presentation; verbalization makes the concept explicit. There are infinite concepts associated with an object, none integral to it. However, we always perceive an object in a concept as an instantiation of a universal; it is a cow, white, bovine, four-legged, etc. The point to note is that concepts or universals (vikalpa-s) are word-generated and superimposed on the objects; there are no ‘thing-universals’ or real universals over and above these. Bhartṛhari’s defends linguistic nominalism, according to which, words are the only universals that exist; thing-universals are word-generated illusions. As Matilal remarks, for Bhartṛhari there is not much of a distinction between words and concepts, they are two sides of the same coin (Matilal, 1986, 396).