Arendt and the Illusion of an "Inner Life"

Hannah Arendt found a passage on page 183 of M. Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception worthy of being underlined and marked with two exclamation points. The text of that passage reads as follows: "Thought is no 'internal thing,' and does not exist independently of the world and of words. What misleads us in this connection, and causes us to believe in a thought which exists for itself prior to expression, is thought already constituted and expressed, which we can silently recall to ourselves, and through which we acquire the illusion of an inner life."