In this work, de Cordemoy (1620–1684) deals with the necessity, advocated by Descartes, of an anti-mechanistic explanation of the human power of speech. The explanation of why animals cannot »speak» in the narrow sense of the word already preempted Herder‹s ideas. Of particular interest is the concept of speech as a permanently creative process in which the individual speaking realizes each systematically predetermined possibility of a certain language.