The profound difficulties in the interpretation of most philo-
sophic texts make the use of indexes, concordances, glossaries, not
to mention commentaries, introductions, and notes all but essential
for student and scholar. When kings build, says Schiller, there is
plenty of work for carters. In particular, the fine-cut distinctions,
strange vocabulary, and subtle variations of terminology in Ludwig Wittgenstein
's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus are of a sort that bring
not only the occasional but also the determined and well-prepared
reader to desperation. In this Index we do not propose to give the
solution to a single one of the difficulties in the Tractatus; but if
some means of finding the materials for solving those difficulties
are not at hand in the present little work, we shall be keenly dis-
appointed.

The Index is in English, if for no other reason than that we be-
lieve that there will be more readers of the text in that language
than in Wittgenstein's native tongue. Despite his long sojourn in
England, he evidently continued to think mainly in German--certainly
most of his texts are written out in German. But it has been no more
than a question of time before all these texts are Englished when
they are put into book form.

Wittgenstein used many words in a Germanic form virtually the
same as in English, words having Greek or Latin roots and remaining
unchanged, or nearly so, in both modern languages: das Mystische,
die Relation, die Grammatik. Finding a translation for these is, of
course, no great matter. Nor is there much trouble with such common
words as die Erfahrung, which almost without question goes into ex-
perience. But many of his important terms, those most characteristic-
ally his, are extremely difficult to put into English, either because
the German seems not to possess any precise equivalent in the latter
language (as with Gegenstand, ordinarily translated as object, but
which has a special twist, as being something standing over against),
or because Wittgenstein himself placed these terms in rather unusual
contexts, altering what they ordinarily mean, even making them appear
ambiguous. We have in mind such words as Sachlage, commonly rendered
state of affairs by C. K. Ogden, the first translator of the Tracta-
tus, though this disconnects the word from Sache, entity, another
word used for object or thing. Wittgenstein had obviously intended
his two words to belong together; though they are not synonymous,
their common root must somehow be brought out. Then again there is
Sachverhalt, usually translated atomic fact, though a Sachverhalt is
not really always existent as a fact would have to be: there can be
a negative Sachverhalt. Moreover, -verhalt in this word has a meaning
of relationship completely neglected in atomic fact. Lastly, atomic
fact and state of affairs and object seem much farther apart in Eng-
lish than Sachverhalt, Sachlage, and Sache. Had Wittgenstein himself
wished to separate these three notions, he could have found plenty
of German words to hand.

There is one trick of style which makes the reader think that the
author of the Tractatus was not being careful about his terminology
after all: in many instances we find two words, one with a classical
root, such as Relation, the other of Teutonic origin, Beziehung, which
are almost impossible to render by more than one English word. At the

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