“momentary deity” or revelation, as it seemed to nonliterate 
men. Ernst Cassirer’s Language and Myth  presents this aspect 
of nonliterate human awareness, surveying the wide range of 
current study of language origins and development. Towards 
the end of the nineteenth century numerous students of 
nonliterate societies had begun to have doubts about the a 
priori character of logical categories. Today, when the role of 
phonetic literacy in the creating of the techniques of 
enunciation of propositions (“formal logic”) is well known, it is 
still supposed, even by some anthropologists, that Euclidean 
space and three-dimensional visual perception is a universal 
datum of mankind. The absence of such space in native art is 
considered by such scholars to be owing to lack of artistic skill. 
Cassirer, reporting on the notion of words as myth (the 
etymology of mythos  indicates that it means “word”) says 
(p. 62):