A common idea/perception was that an object/idea could be stamped upon the soul upon the occasion of an idea excited from the comprehensive power of the intellect itself. Only Humboldt, who was a living connection between the rationalist Enlightenment and the Romantic period, devised the underlying generative system of language perception . Again, Chomsky asserts that "contemporary research in perception has returned to the investigation of internally represented schemata...". The current work of modern linguistics continues the tradition of "Cartesian" linguistics in transformational grammar.