Another vital referent is Leibniz’s project of an ideographic language called "universal character", based on the principles of Chinese characters. It would contain small figures representing "visible things by their lines, and the invisible, by the visible which accompany them", as well as adding "certain additional marks, suitable to make understood the flexions and the particles."[1]: 569 Bliss stated that his own work was an attempt to take up the thread of Leibniz's project.