Two discrepancies haunt the philosophy of Wittgenstein. One is that between the last few pages of the Tractatus and all that has gone before. The other is the rather strange stylistic diversity between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. I shall try in this paper to put forward hypotheses or semi-causal explanations which may cast some light on at least one of these prior problems. To those who believe that philosophical changes are exclusively the product of logical considerations my ruminations will be both uninteresting and irrelevant. But to those who are more sympathetic to considerations of time and circumstance, who believe in an intimate relationship between the form and content of philosophy and the conditions of philosophizing, who find neither biography nor social milieu unimportant for an understanding of philosophical “meaning,” there may be something here which if not demonstrably true, may yet be moderately suggestive and worthy of attention.