Many think, therefore I am.

"The three words Descartes had wrestled from the emptiness were filled with swarms of ancient ghosts, with mobs of long-gone men. Cogito was a term used by millions of Romans and those who'd sheltered behind their shields and swords. Seldom was a word more crowded with flocks and flurries of humanity. For the roots of cogito - com-agito -meant "to drive together, to collect, to crowd, to bring together, to summon, to congretate or convene." The Indo-European hordes - those battling cattle herders from north of the Black Sea who had spread their language with their conquests - had rolled invisibly through Descartes' mind as well, for they had given the Romans these terms for animal roundups. The warrior Indo-Europeans had also contributed the probable root for the ending "o," which they also gave to you and me. The Sanskrit is ahám, from which we've plucked the English version of the Latin "o"- "I". And where had Descartes gotten ergo, not to mention sum? From wave after wave of Ice Age hunter-gatherers, inventing and then polishing the first crude forms of syntax, sentence, suffix, noun, and verb. From tribes of cave-wall painters and armies of empire-builders who were rolled into each word. Yes Descartes had used this mob to state the one thing he knew: that he alone existed - that he alone sat in a room contributed by horders who had invented the hut, the beam, the plank, the hammer, the nail, and the many other techno-turns that had finally made it possible for Descartes to travel on a road into that strange invention called a town. Swarms of the dead swam through Descartes' mind and fed his body, clothing and sheltering him so he could do the thinking he mistook for solitude.

Like Descartes, you think, therefore you are. And through your thinking pours the army of forefathers and foremothers who have gone before. Each one of us is a walking storeroom of this planet's history. Trillions of early beings lived and died to perfect the very cells of which we are conceived. When the skies of this newborn earth rained poisons, our microscopic ancestors sighed oxygen into the stinging air and left us with the atmosphere we breathe. Sea-slitherers and land-lumberers bequethed to us the bones with which we stand and the brains with which we think. Hordes of fellow humans perfected the shoes we wear, the streets we walk, and the paper or computer screen from which we glean our thoughts. From a legacy of billions come our dreams of individuality.

The farms of Argentina feed you, the oil of Arabs speeds you, and the citizens of Asia labor to supply your needs. For you, you are a multitude. And much of that same multitude resides as well in me."

Excerpt from an article in What is Enlightenment Magazine, Issue 41, Aug-Oct 2008, called "The Ghosts of Millions in the Lonely Mind: Descartes' Delusion," by Harold Bloom.