Whitehead's often quoted remark, cited here, provides a useful background for a discussion of the history of linguistics in the modern period. As applied to the theory of language structure, his assessment is quite correct with regard to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Modern linguistics, however, has self-consciously dissociated itself from traditional linguistic theory and has attempted to construct a theory of language in an entirely new and independent way. The contributions to linguistic theory of an earlier European tradition have in general been of little interest to professional linguists, who have occupied themselves with quite different topics within an intellectual framework that is not receptive to the problems that gave rise to earlier linguistic study or the insights that it achieved; and these contributions are by now largely unknown or regarded with unconcealed contempt. The few modern studies of the history of linguistics have typically taken the position that “everything before the 19th century, not yet being linguistics, can be dealt with in a few lines.” In recent years, there has been a noticeable reawakening of interest in questions that were, in fact, studied in a serious and fruitful way during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, though rarely since. Furthermore, this return to classical concerns has led to a rediscovery of much that was well understood in this period – what I will call the period of “Cartesian linguistics,” for reasons that will be sketched below.