 At this point in his intellectual development, the mid-1920s, Ramsey was developing the insights he found in Russell and Wittgenstein. But Ramsey not only took many of their ideas to a new level of detail and sophistication but pushed boundaries by showing that they had not gone far enough. “Universals” provides a luminous example of Ramsey pushing against boundaries that had held Russell back. According to Russell, “The influence of language on philosophy has, I believe, been profound and almost unrecognized. If we are not to be misled by this influence it is necessary to become conscious of it and to ask how far it is legitimate” (Russell 1924, 330). Russell was specifically concerned that the subject-predicate form common to Indo-European languages had misled Western philosophers, conditioning them to take for granted a substance-attribute ontology whilst being blind to the existence of relations. Russell proposed to remedy the situation by introducing alongside the category of particulars, a broader category of universals which subsumed both (monadic) attributes and (polyadic) relations. But, in “Universals”, Ramsey argued that Russell had not gone far enough, because the particular-universal distinction itself was just a further shadow cast by language. Ramsey wrote, “nearly all philosophers, including Mr Russell himself have been misled by language in a far more far-reaching way than that”, i.e. more far-reaching than being led merely to deny the existence of relations, because “the whole theory of particulars and universals is due to mistaking for a fundamental characteristic of reality, what is merely a characteristic of language” (1925b, 405). But Ramsey wasn’t aiming to replace the particular-universal distinction with an alternative distinction of his own. Instead he aimed to inculcate in his reader a studied indifference, which meant withholding judgment, at least a priori, about the forms or categories of atomic objects, as Wittgenstein had done in the Tractatus.