SOURCE: "On Cassirer's Theory of Language and Myth," in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassier, edited by Paul Arthur Schlipp, The Library of Living Philosophers, Inc., 1949, pp. 381-400.

In the following essay, Langer explores the relationship between myth and language in Cassirer's work.

Every philosopher has his tradition. His thought has developed amid certain problems, certain basic alternatives of opinion, that embody the key concepts which dominate his time and his environment and which will always be reflected, positively or by negation, in his own work. They are the forms of thought he has inherited, wherein he naturally thinks, or from which his maturer conceptions depart.

The continuity of culture lies in this handing down of usable forms. Any campaign to discard tradition for the sake of novelty as such, without specific reason in each case to break through a certain convention of thought, leads to dilettantism, whether it...