The men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries do not think of wealth, nature, or languages in terms that had been bequeathed to them by preceding ages or in forms that presaged what was soon to be discovered; they think of them in terms of a general arrangement that not only prescribes their concepts and methods, but also, more fundamentally, defines a certain mode of being for language, natural individuals, and the objects of need and desire; this mode of being is that of representation.