SPEECH.

We are now coming to close quarters with our subject. All the foregoing chapters have been arranged with a view to preparing the way for what is hereafter to follow; and, therefore, as already remarked, I have thus far presented material over which I do not think it is possible that any dispute can arise. But now we come to that particular exhibition of the sign-making faculty which not only appears to be peculiar to man, but which obviously presents so great an advance upon all the lower phases hitherto considered, that it is the place where my opponents have chosen to take their stand. When a man maintains that there is a difference of kind between animal and human intelligence, he naturally feels himself under some obligation to indicate the point where this difference obtains. To say that it obtains with the appearance of language, in the sense of sign-making, is obviously too wide a statement; for, as we have now so fully seen, language, in this widest sense, demonstrably obtains among the lower animals. Consequently, the line must be drawn, not at language or sign-making, but at that particular kind of sign-making which we understand by Speech. Now the distinctive peculiarity of this kind of sign-making—and one, therefore, which does not occur in any other kind—consists in predication, or the using of signs as movable types for the purpose of making propositions. It does not signify whether or not the signs thus used are words. The gestures of Indians and deaf-mutes admit, as we have seen, of being wrought up into a machinery of predication which, for all purposes of practical life, is almost as efficient as speech. The distinction, therefore, resides in the intellectual powers; not in the symbols thereof. So that a man means, it matters not by what system of signs he expresses his meaning: the distinction between him and the brute consists in his being able to mean a proposition. Now, the kind of mental act whereby a man is thus enabled to mean a proposition is called by psychologists an act of Judgment. Predication, or the making of a proposition, is nothing more nor less than the expression of a judgment; and a judgment is nothing more nor less than the apprehension of whatever meaning it may be that a proposition serves to set forth. Therefore, it belongs to the very essence of predication that it should involve a judgment; and it belongs to the very essence of a judgment that it should admit of being stated in the form of a proposition.[93]

Lastly, just as this is the place where my opponents take a stand, so, as they freely allow, it is the only place where they can take a stand. If once this chasm of speech were bridged, there would be no further chasm to cross. From the simplest judgment which it is possible to make, and therefore from the simplest proposition which it is possible to construct, it is on all hands admitted that human intelligence displays an otherwise uniform or uninterrupted ascent through all the grades of excellence which it afterwards presents. Here, then, and here alone, we have what Professor Max MÜller calls the Rubicon of Mind, which separates the brute from the man, and over which, it is alleged, the army of Science can never hope to pass.

In order to present the full difficulty which is here encountered, I will allow it to be stated by the ablest of my opponents. As President of the Biological Section of the British Association in 1879, Mr. Mivart expressed his matured thought upon the subject thus:—

“The simplest element of thought seems to me to be a ‘judgment,’ with intuition of reality concerning some ‘fact,’ regarded as a fact real or ideal. Moreover, this judgment is not itself a modified imagination, because the imaginations which may give occasion to it persist unmodified in the mind side by side with the judgment they have called up. Let us take, as examples, the judgments, ‘That thing is good to eat,’ and ‘Nothing can be and not be at the same time and in the same sense.’ As to the former, we vaguely imagine ‘things good to eat;’ but they must exist beside the judgment, not in it. They can be recalled, compared, and seen to co-exist. So with the other judgment, the mind is occupied with certain abstract ideas, though the imagination has certain vague ‘images’ answering respectively to ‘a thing being,’ and ‘a thing not being,’ and to ‘at the same time’ and ‘in the same sense;’ but the images do not constitute the judgment itself, any more than human ‘swimming’ is made up of limbs and fluid, though without such necessary elements no such swimming could take place.[94]

“This distinction is also shown by the fact that one and the same idea may be suggested to, and maintained in, the mind by the help of the most incongruous images, and very different ideas by the very same image; this we may see to be the case with such ideas as ‘number,’ ‘purpose,’ ‘motion,’ ‘identity,’ &c.

“But the distinctness of ‘thought’ from ‘imagination’ may perhaps be made clearer by the drawing out fully what we really do when we make some simple judgment, as, e.g., ‘A negro is black.’ Here, in the first place, we directly and explicitly affirm that there is a conformity between the external thing, ‘a negro,’ and the external quality ‘blackness’—the negro possessing that quality. We affirm, secondarily and implicitly, a conformity between two external entities and two corresponding internal concepts. And thirdly, and lastly, we also implicitly affirm the existence of a conformity between the subjective judgment and the objective existence.”[95]

I will next allow this matter to be presented in the words of another adversary, and one whom Mr. Mivart approvingly quotes.

“The question is, Can the sense say anything—make a judgment at all? Can it furnish the blank formula of a judgment—the ‘is’ in ‘A is B’? The grass of the battlefield was green, and the sense gave both the grass and the greenness; but did it affirm that ‘the grass is green’? It may be assumed that ‘grass’ and ‘green’ together form one complex object, which is an object under space and time, and therefore of sense. But against this the rejoinder at once is, that the sense may indeed take in and report (so to speak) a complex object, but that in this case the question is, not about the complex object, but about the complexity of the object. It is one thing to see green grass, and evidently quite another to affirm the greenness of the grass. The difference is all the difference between seeing two things united, and seeing them as united.... If a brute could think ‘is,’ brute and man would be brothers. ‘Is,’ as the copula of a judgment, implies the mental separation, and recombination of two terms that only exist united in nature, and can therefore never have impressed the sense except as one thing.[96] And ‘is,’ considered as a substantive verb, as in the example ‘This man is,’ contains in itself the application of the copula of judgment to the most elementary of all abstractions—‘thing’ or ‘something.’ Yet if a being has the power of thinking—‘thing,’ it has the power of transcending space and time by dividing or decomposing the phenomenally one. Here is the point where instinct ends and reason begins.”[97]

It would be easy to add quotations from other writers to the same effect as the above;[98] but these may be held sufficient to give material for the first stage of my criticism, which is of a purely technical character. I affirm that all writers who thus take their stand upon the distinctively human faculty of predication are taking their stand at the wrong place. In other words, without at present disputing whether we have to do with a distinction of kind or of degree, I say, and say confidently, that the distinction in question—i.e. between animal and human intelligence—may be easily proved to occur further back than at the faculty of predication, or the forming of a proposition. The distinction occurs at the faculty of denomination, or the bestowing of a name, known as such. “The simplest element of thought” is not a “judgment:” the simplest element of thought is a concept. That this is the case admits of being easily demonstrated in several different ways.

In the first place, it is evident that there could be no judgments without concepts, just as there could be no propositions without terms. A judgment is the result of a comparison of concepts, and this is the reason why it can only find expression in a proposition, which sets forth the relation between the concepts by bringing into apposition their corresponding terms. Judgments, therefore, are compounds of thought: the elements are concepts.

In the second place, given the power of conceiving, and the germ of judgment is implied, though not expanded into the blossom of formal predication. For whenever we bestow a name we are implicitly judging that the thing to which we apply the name presents the attributes connoted by that name, and thus we are virtually predicating the fact. For example, when I call a man a “Negro,” the very term itself affirms blackness as the distinctive quality of that individual—just as does the equivalent nursery term, “Black-man.” To utter the name Negro, therefore, or the name Black-man, is to form and pronounce at least two judgments touching an individual object of sensuous perception—to wit, that it is a man, and that he is black. The judgments so formed and pronounced are doubtless not so explicit as is the case when both subject and predicate are associated in the full proposition—“A negro is black;” but in the single term Negro, or Black-man, both these elements were already present, and must have been so if the name were in any degree at all conceptual—i.e. denominative as distinguished from denotative. In the illustration “Negro,” or “Black-man,” it so happens that the connotation of the name is directly given by the etymology of the name; but this circumstance is immaterial. Whether or not the etymology of a connotative name happens to fit the particular subject to which it is applied, the same kind of classificatory judgment is required for any appropriate application of the same. If, with Blumenbach, I am accustomed to call a negro an Ethiopian, when I apply this name to any representative of that race, I am performing the same mental act as my neighbour who calls him a Negro, or my child who calls him a Black-man. If it should be said that in all such cases the act of naming is so immediately due to association that no demand is made upon the powers of judgment, the admission would be a dangerous one for my opponents to make, since the same remark would apply to the full proposition, “That man is black.” Moreover, the objection admits of being easily disposed of by choosing instances of naming where associations have not yet been definitively fixed. If I am travelling in a strange continent, and amid all the unfamiliar flora there encountered I suddenly perceive a plant which I think I know, before I name it to my friend as that plant, I would submit it to close scrutiny—i.e. carefully judge its resemblances to the known or familiar species. In short, all connotative names, when denominatively applied, betoken acts of judgment, which differ from those concerned in full predication only as regards the form of their expression. Or, as Mill very tersely remarks, “whenever the names given to objects convey any information, that is, whenever they have properly any meaning, the meaning resides not in what they denote, but in what they connote.” And although in his elaborate treatment of Names and Propositions he omits expressly to notice the point now before us, it is clearly implied in the above quotation. The point is that connotative names (or denominative terms)[99] are often in themselves of predicative value; and this point is clearly implied in the above quotation, because, whenever “names given to objects convey any information,” the information thus conveyed is virtually predicated: the “meaning” connoted by the name is affirmed in the mere act of bestowing the name, which thus in itself becomes a condensed proposition. “It is a truism of psychology that the terms of a proposition, when closely interrogated, turn out to be nothing but abbreviated judgments.”[100]

This view of the matter, then, is the only one that can be countenanced by psychology. It is likewise the only one that can be countenanced by philology, or the study of language in the making. Of this fact I will adduce abundant evidence in a subsequent chapter, where it will be shown, as Professor Max MÜller says, that “every name was originally a proposition.” But at present I am only concerned with one of the most elementary points of purely psychological analysis, and will therefore postpone the independent illumination of the whole philosophy of predication which of late years has been so splendidly furnished by the comparative study of languages.

From whatever point of view, therefore, we look at the matter, we are bound to conclude, either that the term “judgment” must be applied indifferently to the act of denominating and to the act of predicating, or else, if it be restricted to the latter, that it must not be regarded as “the simplest element of thought.” And thus we are led back to the position previously gained while treating of the Logic of Concepts. For we then found that names are the steps of the intellectual ladder whereby we climb into higher and higher regions of ideation; and although our progress is assisted by formal predication, or discursive thought, this is but the muscular energy, so to speak, which would in itself be useless but for the rungs already supplied, and on which alone that energy can be expended. Or, to vary the metaphor, conceptual names are the ingredients out of which is formed the structure of propositions; and, in order that this formation should take place, there must already be in the ingredients that element of vitality which constitutes the vis formativa. Now, this element of vitality is the element of conceptual ideation, already exhibited in every denominative term.

Therefore, for the sake at once of clearness and of brevity, I will hereafter speak of predication as material and formal. By material predication I will mean conceptual denomination, whereby, in the mere act of bestowing a connotative term, we are virtually predicating of the thing thus designated some fact, quality, or relation, which the name bestowed is intended to indicate. By formal predication I will mean the apposition of denominative terms, with the intention of setting forth some relation which is thus expressed as subsisting between them. But, as already observed, I regard this distinction as artificial. Psychologically speaking, there is no line of demarcation between these two kinds of predication. Whether I say “Fool,” or “Thou art a fool,” I am similarly assigning the subject of my remark to a certain category of men: I am similarly giving expression to my judgment with regard to the qualities presented by one particular man. The distinction, then, between what I call material and formal predication is merely a distinction in rhetoric: as a matter of psychology there is no distinction at all.

If to all this it should be objected, in accordance with the psychological doctrines set forth by Mr. Mivart, above quoted, that a judgment as embodied in a proposition differs from a concept as embodied in a name in respect of the copula, and therefore in presenting the idea of existence as existence; I answer, in the first place, that every concept must necessarily present this idea however implicitly; and, in the next place, that however explicitly it may be stated as a judgment, it is not of more conceptual value than that of any other quality belonging to a subject. As regards the first point, when an object, a quality, an action, &c., is named, it is thereby abstracted as a distinct creation of thought, separated out from other things, and made to stand before the mind as a distinct entity (see Chapter IV.). Therefore, in the very act of naming we are virtually predicating existence of the thing named: the power to “think is” is the power concerned in the formation of a concept, not in the apposing of concepts when formed. All that is done in an act of such apposition is to bring together two ideas of two things already conceived as existing: were it not so there could be no-things to compare.[101]

And now, as regards the second point, so far is it from being true that the predication of existence is the essential or most important feature even of a full or formal proposition, that it is really the least essential or least important. For existence is the category to which everything must belong if it is to be judged about at all, and therefore merely to judge that A is and B is, is to form the most barren (or least significant) judgment that can be formed with regard to A or B; and when we bring these two judgments (concepts) together in the proposition A is B, the new judgment which we make has nothing to do with the existence either of A or of B, nor has it really anything to do with existence as such. The existence both of A and of B has been already pre-supposed in the two concepts, and when these two existing things are brought into apposition, no third existence is thereby supposed to have been created. The copula therefore really stands, not as a symbol of existence, but as the symbol of relation, and might just as well be replaced by any other sign (such as =), or, indeed, be dispensed with altogether. “As we use the verb is, so the Latins use their verb est and the Greeks their [Greek: esti] through all its declensions. Whether all other nations of the world have in their several languages a word that answereth to it, or not, I cannot tell; but I am sure they have no need of it. For the placing of two names in order [i.e. in apposition] may serve to signify their consequence, if it were the custom, as well as the words is, to be, and the like. And if it were so, that there were a language without any verb answering to est, or is, or be, yet the men that used it would be not a jot the less capable of inferring, concluding, and of all kind of reasoning than were the Greeks and Latins.” This shrewd analysis by Hobbes is justly said by Mill to be “the only analysis of a proposition which is rigorously true of all propositions without exception;” and Professor Max MÜller says of it, “Hobbes, though utterly ignorant of the historical antecedents of language, agrees with us in the most remarkable manner.”[102]

Thus, then, upon the whole, and without further treatment, it may be concluded that whether we look to its simplest manifestations or to its most complex, we must alike conclude that it is the faculty of conception, not that of judgment—the faculty of denomination, not that of predication—which we have to regard as “the simplest element of thought.” Of course, if it were said that these two faculties are one in kind—that in order to conceive we must judge, and in order to name we must predicate—I should have no objection to offer. All I am at present engaged upon is to make it clear that the distinction between man and brute in respect of the Logos must be drawn at the place where this distinction first obtains; and this place is where judgment is concerned with conception, or with the bestowing of names in the sense previously explained as denominative. The subsequent working up of names into propositions is merely a further exhibition of the self-same faculty. It is as true of judgment when displayed in denomination as it is of judgment when displayed in predication, that “it is not itself a modified imagination, because the imaginations which may give rise to it persist unmodified in the mind side by side with it.” For, as we have seen, the act of denominating (as distinguished from denotating) is in and of itself an act of predicating. When a naturalist bestows a name upon a new species of plant or animal, he has judged a resemblance and predicates a fact—i.e. that the hitherto unnamed form belongs to certain genus or kind. And so it is with all other names when conceptually bestowed, because everywhere such names are expressions of conceptual classification—the bringing together of like things, or the separation of unlike. In short, all names which present any conceptual meaning are in themselves condensed propositions, or “material predications;” and only as such can they afterwards become terms, i.e. constitute the essential elements of any more extended proposition, or “formal predication.” Therefore it is the faculty of naming wherein is first displayed—and, according to the doctrine of Nominalism, whereby is first attained—that great and distinctive characteristic of the human mind which Mr. Mivart and those who think with him have in view; and, unless we espouse the doctrine of Realism—which neither these nor any other psychologists with whom I have to do are likely nowadays to countenance,—it is plain that “the simplest element of thought” is a concept.

If I do not apologize for having occupied so much space over so obvious a point, it is only because I believe that any one who reads these pages will sympathize with my desire to avoid ambiguity, and thus to reduce the question before us to its naked reality. So far, it will be observed, this question has not been touched. I am not disputing that an immense and an extraordinary distinction obtains, and I do not anticipate that either Mr. Mivart or any one else will take exception to this preliminary clearing of the ground, which has been necessitated only on account of my opponents having been careless enough to represent the Proposition as the simplest exhibition of the Logos. But now the time has arrived when we must tackle the distinction in serious earnest.

Wherein does this distinction truly consist? It consists, as I believe all my opponents will allow, in the power which the human being displays of objectifying ideas, or of setting one state of mind before another state, and contemplating the relation between them. The power to “think is”—or, as I should prefer to state it, the power to think at all—is the power which is given by introspective reflection in the light of self-consciousness. It is because the human mind is able, so to speak, to stand outside of itself, and thus to constitute its own ideas the subject-matter of its own thought, that it is capable of judgment in the technical sense above explained, whether in the act of conception or in that of predication. For thus it is that these ideas are enabled “to exist beside the judgment, not in it;” thus it is that they may themselves become objects of thought. We have no evidence to show that any animal is capable of thus objectifying its own ideas; and, therefore, we have no evidence that any animal is capable of judgment. Indeed I will go further, and affirm that we have the best evidence which is derivable from what are necessarily ejective sources, to prove that no animal can possibly attain to these excellencies of subjective life. This evidence will gradually unfold itself as we proceed, so at present it is enough to say, in general terms, that it consists in a most cogent proof of the absence in brutes of the needful conditions to the occurrence of these excellencies as they obtain in themselves. From which it follows that the great distinction between the brute and the man really lies behind the faculties both of conception and predication: it resides in the conditions to the occurrence of either. What these conditions are I will consider later on. Meanwhile, and in order that we may be perfectly clear about the all-important distinction which is before us, I will re-state it in other terms.

What is the difference between a recept and a concept? I cannot answer this question more clearly or concisely than in the words of the writer in the Dublin Review before quoted. “The difference is all the difference between seeing two things united, and seeing them as united.” The difference is all the difference between perceiving relations, and perceiving the relations as related, or between cognizing a truth, and recognizing that truth as true. The diving bird, which avoids a rock and fearlessly plunges into the sea, unquestionably displays a receptual knowledge of certain “things,” “relations,” and “truths;” but it does not know any of them as such: although it knows them, it does not know that it knows them: however well it knows them, it does not think them, or regard the things, the relations, and the truths which it perceives as themselves the objects of perception. Now, over and above this merely receptual knowledge, man displays conceptual, which means that he is able to do all these things that the bird cannot do: in other words, he is able to set before his mind all the recepts which he has in common with the bird, to think about them as recepts, and by the mere fact, or in the very act of so doing, to convert them into concepts. Concepts, then, differ from recepts in that they are recepts which have themselves become objects of knowledge, and the condition to their taking on this important character is the presence of self-consciousness in the percipient mind.[103]

I have twice stated the distinction as clearly as I am able; but, in order to do it the fullest justice, I will now render it a third time in the words of Mr. Mivart—some of whose terms I have borrowed in the above paragraph, and therefore need not now repeat. He begins by conveying the distinction as it was stated by Buffon, thus:—

“Far from denying feelings to animals, I concede to them everything except thought and reflection.... They have sensations, but no faculty of comparing them with one another, that is to say they have not the power which produces ideas”—i.e. products of reflection. Then, after alluding to Buffon’s views on the distinction between “automatic memory” and “intellectual memory” (i.e. the distinction which I have recognized in the Diagram attached to my previous work by calling the former “memory” and the latter “recollection”), Mr. Mivart adds:—“The distinction is one quite easy to perceive. That we have automatic memory, such as animals have, is obvious: but the presence of intellectual memory may be made evident by searching our minds (so to speak) for something which we have fully remembered before, and thus intellectually remember to have known, though we cannot now bring it before the imagination. And as with memory, so with other of our mental powers, we may, I think, distinguish between a higher and a lower faculty of each; between our higher, self-conscious, reflective mental acts—the acts of our intellectual faculty—and those of our merely sensitive power. This distinction I believe to be one of the most fundamental of all the distinctions of biology, and to be one the apprehension of which is a necessary preliminary to a successful investigation of animal psychology.”[104]

Were it necessary, I could quote from his work, entitled Lessons from Nature, sundry further passages expressing the same distinction in other words; but I have already been careful, even to redundancy, in presenting this distinction, not only because it is the distinction on which Mr. Mivart rests his whole argument for the separation of man from the rest of the animal kingdom as a being unique in kind; but still more because it is, as he is careful to point out, the one real distinction which has hitherto always been drawn by philosophers since the time of Aristotle. And, as I have already observed, it is a distinction which I myself fully recognize, and believe to be the most important of all distinctions in psychology. The only point of difference, therefore, between my opinions and those—I will not say of Mr. Mivart, but—of any other or possible opponent who understands the psychology of this subject, is on the question whether, in view of the light which has now been shed on psychology by the theory of evolution, this important distinction is to be regarded as one of degree or as one of kind. I shall now proceed to unfold the reasons which lead me to differ on this point from Mr. Mivart, and so from all the still extensive school of which he is, in my opinion, much the ablest spokesman.

We have seen that the distinction in question consists in the presence or absence of the faculty now fully explained, of reflective thought, and that of this faculty the simplest manifestation is, as alleged by my opponents, that which is afforded by “judgment.” But we have also seen that this faculty of judgment does not first appear in predication, unless we extend the term so as to embrace all acts of denomination. In other words, we have seen that judgment first arises with conception—and necessarily so, seeing that neither of these things can occur without the other, but both arise as direct exhibitions of that faculty of self-conscious or reflective thought of which they are everywhere the immediate expression. I will, therefore, begin with a careful analysis of conceptual judgment.

We must first recur to the distinctions set forth at the close of the last chapter, where it was shown that, without any prejudice to the question touching the distinction between man and brute, there are five different stages of intentional sign-making to be recognized—namely, the indicative, the denotative, the connotative, the denominative, and the predicative. From what has now been said regarding the essentially predicative nature of all conceptual names, we may disregard the last of these distinctions, and consider the denominative phase of language as psychologically identical with the predicative. Similarly, we may now neglect the indicative phase, as one which bears no relation to the matters at present before us. Thus we have to fasten attention only upon the differences between the denotative, the connotative, and the denominative phases of language. This has already been done in general terms; but must now be done in more detail. And for the sake of being clear, even at the risk of being tedious, I will begin by repeating the important distinctions already explained.

When a parrot calls a dog Bow-wow (as a parrot, like a child, may easily be taught to do), the parrot may be said, in one sense of the word, to be naming the dog; but it is not predicating any characters as belonging to a dog, or performing any act of judgment with regard to a dog. Although the bird may never (or but rarely) utter the name save when it sees a dog, this fact is attributable to the laws of association acting only in the receptual sphere: it furnishes no shadow of a reason for supposing that the bird thinks about a dog as a dog, or sets the concept Dog before its mind as a separate object of thought. Therefore, all my opponents must allow that in one sense of the word there may be names without concepts: whether as gestures or as words (vocal gestures), there may be signs of things without these signs presenting any vestige of predicative value. Names of this kind I have called denotative: they are marks affixed to objects, qualities, actions, &c., by receptual association alone.

Next, when a denotative name has been formed and applied as the mark of one thing, its use may be extended to denote also another thing, which is seen to belong to the same class or kind. When denotative names are thus extended, they become what I have called connotative. The degree to which such classificatory extension of a denotative name may take place depends, of course, on the degree in which the mind is able to take cognizance of resemblances or analogies. Now, these degrees are as various as are the degrees of intelligence itself. Long before the differential engine of Conception has come to the assistance of Mind, both animals and human beings (as previously shown) are able to go a long way in the distinguishing of resemblances, or analogies, by means of receptual ideation alone. When such receptual discrimination is expressed by the corresponding extension of denotative names, the degree of connotation which such names may thus acquire depends upon the degree of this receptual discrimination. Even my parrot was able to extend its denotative name for a particular dog to any other dog which it happened to see—thus precisely resembling my child, who extended its first denotative word Star to a candle. Connotation, then, begins in the purely receptual sphere of ideation; and although in man it is afterwards carried up into the conceptual sphere, it is obviously most imperative for the purposes of this analysis to draw a distinction between connotation as receptual and as conceptual.

This distinction I have drawn by assigning the word denomination to all connotation which is of a truly conceptual nature—or to the bestowing of names consciously recognized as such. And I have just shown that when connotation is thus denominative or conceptual, it is psychologically the same as predication. Therefore it is only in this denominative sense of the word, or in cases where conceptual ideation is concerned, that an act of naming involves an act of judgment, strictly so called.

Such being the psychological standing of the matter, it is evident that the whole question before us is narrowed down to a clearing up of the relations that obtain between connotation as receptual and conceptual—or between connotation, that is, and connotation that is not, denominative. To do this I will begin by quoting an instance of un-denominative or receptual connotation in the case of a young child.

“There is this peculiar to man—the sound which has been associated in his case with the perception of some particular individual is called up again, not only at the sight of absolutely similar individuals, but also by the presence of individuals strikingly different, though in some respects comprised in the same class. In other words, analogies which do not strike animals strike men. The child says Bow-wow, first to the house-dog, then, after a little, he says Bow-wow to the terriers, mastiffs, and Newfoundlands he sees in the street. A little later he does what an animal never does, he says Bow-wow to a paste-board dog which barks when squeezed, then to a paste-board dog which does not bark, but runs on wheels, then to the silent motionless bronze dog which ornaments the drawing-room, then to his little cousin who runs about the room on all fours, then, at last, to a picture representing a dog.”[105]

Now, in this small but typical history we have a clear exhibition, in a simple form, of the development of a connotative name within the purely receptual sphere. At first the word Bow-wow was merely a denotative name—or a mark affixed to a particular object of perception. But when the child’s mind took cognizance of the resemblances between the house-dog, terriers, mastiffs, and Newfoundlands, it expressed the fact by extending the name Bow-wow to all these dogs. The name, from being particular, thus became generic, or indicative of resemblances; and, therefore, from being merely denotative, became truly connotative: it now served to express common attributes. Next, this receptual connotation of the name was still further widened, so as to include—or to signify—the resemblances between dogs and their images, pictures, &c. Now, in these several and successive acts of connotative naming, the child was obviously advancing to higher and higher levels of receptual classification; but, no less obviously, it would be absurd to suppose that the child was thus raising the name Bow-wow to any conceptual value. All that any child in such a case is doing is to extend its receptual appreciation of resemblance through widening circles of generic grouping, and correspondingly to extend the receptual connotation of a denotative name. In order to do this (within the limits that we are now considering), there is no need for any introspective regarding of the name as a name: there is no need to contemplate the widening connotation of the name: there is no need to judge, to define, to denominate. Such classification as is here effected can be effected within the region of receptual consciousness alone (as we well know from the analogous case of the parrot, and the “practical inferences” of the lower animals generally); therefore, if the denotative name originally assigned to a particular dog admitted of being so assigned as merely the mark of that particular recept, there is no reason to suppose that its subsequent extension to the more generic recepts afterwards experienced involves any demand upon the conceptual faculty, or implies that the child could only extend this name from a house-dog to a terrier by first performing an act of introspective thought—which, indeed, as we shall see later on, it is demonstrably impossible that a child of this age can be able to do.

Nevertheless, it is evident that already the child has done more than the parrot. For a parrot will never extend its denotative name of a particular dog to the picture, or even to the image of a dog. The utmost that a parrot will do is to extend the denotative name from one particular dog to another particular dog, which, however, may differ considerably from the former as to size, colour, and general appearance. Still, I presume, no one will maintain that thus far there is the faintest evidence of a difference of kind between the connotative faculty of the bird and that of the child. All that these facts can be held to show is that—in the words already quoted from M. Taine while narrating these facts—“analogies which do not strike animals strike men.” Or, in my own phraseology, the receptual faculties of a parrot do not go further than the receptual faculties of a very young child: consequently, the denotative name in the case of the parrot only undergoes the first step in the process of receptual extension—namely, from a house-dog to a terrier, a setter, a mastiff, a Newfoundland, &c. But in the case of the child, after having reached this stage, the process of extension continues, so as to embrace images, and eventually pictures of dogs. This difference, however, only shows an advance in the merely receptual faculties: does not suggest that in order to carry the extension of the name through these second and third stages, demand has yet been made on the distinctively human powers of conceptual thought—any more than such powers were required to carry it through the first stage in the case of the parrot.

Hence we see again that the distinction already drawn between denotative and connotative names is not co-extensive with the distinction between ideas as receptual and conceptual. Or, in other words, names may be in some measure connotative even in the absence of self-consciousness. For if we say that a child is connoting resemblances when it extends the name Bow-wow from a particular dog to dogs in general, clearly we must say the same thing of a parrot when we find that thus far it goes with the child. Therefore it is that I have distinguished between connotation as receptual and conceptual—i.e. by calling the latter denomination. Receptual connotation represents a higher level of ideational faculty than mere denotation; but a lower level than conceptual connotation, or denomination. Moreover, receptual connotation admits of many degrees before we can discern the smallest reason for supposing that it is even in the lowest degree conceptual. Connotation of all degrees depending on perceptions of resemblances or analogies, the higher the receptual life, and therefore the greater the aptitude of receptual classification, the more will such classification become reflected in connotative expression. Therefore it is that the child will not only surpass the parrot in its receptual connotation from dogs to pictures of dogs; but, as we shall afterwards see, will go much further even than this before it gives any signs at all of conceptual connotation, or true denomination. Thus we see that between the most rudimentary receptual connotation which a very young child shares with a parrot, and the fully conceptual connotation which it subsequently attains, there is a large intervening province due to the acquisition of a higher receptual life. Or, to put the same thing in other words, there is a large tract of ideation lying between the highest receptual life of a brute and the lowest conceptual life of a man: this tract is occupied by the growing child from the time at which its ideation surpasses that of the brute, until it begins to attain the faculty of self-conscious reflection. This intervening tract of ideation, therefore, may be termed “higher receptual,” in contradistinction to the lower receptual ideation which a younger child shares with the lower animals.

At this point I must ask the reader carefully to fasten in his mind these various distinctions. Nor will it be difficult to do so after a small amount of attention. It will be remembered that in Chapter IV. I instituted a distinction between concepts as higher and lower, which was methodically similar to that which I have now to institute between recepts. A “lower concept” was defined to be nothing more than a “named recept,”[106] while a “higher concept” was understood to be one that is “compounded of other concepts”—i.e. the named result of a grouping of concepts, as when we speak of the “mechanical equivalent of heat.” So that altogether we have four stages of ideation to recognize, each of which occupies an immensely large territory of mind. These four stages I will present in serial order.

(1) Lower Recepts, comprising the mental life of all the lower animals, and so including such powers of receptual connotation as a child when first emerging from infancy shares with a parrot.

(2) Higher Recepts, comprising all the extensive tract of ideation that belongs to a child between the time when its powers of receptual connotation first surpass those of a parrot, up to the age at which connotation as merely denotative begins to become also denominative.

(3) Lower Concepts, comprising the province of conceptual ideation where this first emerges from the higher receptual, up to the point where denominative connotation has to do, not merely with the naming of recepts, but also with that of associated concepts.

(4) Higher Concepts, comprising all the further excellencies of human thought.

Higher Recepts, then, are what may be conveniently termed Pre-concepts:[107] they occupy the interval between the receptual life of brute and the earliest dawn of the conceptual life of man. A pre-concept, therefore, is that kind of higher recept which is not to be met with in any brute; but which occurs in the human being after surpassing the brute and before attaining self-consciousness. Be it observed that in thus coining the words higher recepts or pre-concepts, I am not in any way prejudicing the case of my opponents; I am merely marking off a certain territory of ideation which has now for the first time been indicated. Of course my object eventually is to show that in the history of a growing child, just as sensations give rise to percepts, and percepts to recepts (as they do among animals), so do recepts give rise to pre-concepts, pre-concepts to concepts, concepts to propositions, and propositions to syllogisms. But in now supplying this intermediate link of pre-concepts I am not in any way pre-judging the issue: I am merely marking out the ground for discussion. No one of my opponents can dispute my facts, which are too obvious to admit of question. Therefore, if they object to my classification of them so far as the novel division of pre-concepts is concerned, it must be because they think that by instituting this division I am surreptitiously bringing the mind of a child nearer to that of an animal than they deem altogether safe. What, then, I ask, would they have me do? If I fail to institute this division, I should have to prejudice the question indeed. Either there is some distinction between the naming powers of a parrot and those of a young child, or else there is not. If there is no distinction, so much the better for the purposes of my argument. But I allow that there is a distinction, and I draw it at the first place where it can possibly be said that the intelligence of a child differs in any way at all from that of a parrot—i.e. where the naming powers of a child demonstrably excel those of a parrot, or any other brute. If this place happens to be before the rise of conceptual powers, I am not responsible for the fact; nor in stating it am I at all disparaging the position of any opponent who takes his stand upon these powers as distinctive of man. If his position were worth anything before, it cannot be affected by my drawing attention to the fact that, while a parrot will extend its denotative name of a dog from a terrier to a setter, it will not follow a child any further in the process of receptual connotation.

Or, to put it in another way, when the child says Bow-wow to a setter, after having learnt this name for a terrier, it is either judging a resemblance and predicating a fact, or else it is doing neither of these things. If my opponents elect to say that the child is doing both these things, there is an end of the only issue between us; for in that case a parrot also is able both to judge and to predicate. On the other hand, if my opponents adopt the wiser course, and accept my distinction between names as receptual and conceptual, they must also follow me in recognizing the border-land of pre-concepts as lying between the recepts of a bird and the concepts of a man—i.e. the territory which is first occupied by the higher receptual life of a child before this passes into the conceptual life of a man,—for that such a border-land does exist I will prove still more incontestably later on. There is, then, as a matter of observable fact, a territory of ideation which separates the highest recepts of a brute from the lowest concepts of a human being; and all that my term pre-conception is designed to do is to name this intervening territory.

Now, if this is the case with regard to naming, clearly it must also be the case with regard to judging: if there is a stage of pre-conception, there must also be a stage of pre-judgment. For we have seen that it is of the essence of a judgment that it should be concerned with concepts: if the mind be concerned merely with recepts, no act of true judgment can be said to have been performed. When a child says Bow-wow to the picture of a dog, no one can maintain that he is actually judging the resemblance of the picture to a dog, unless it be supposed that for this act of receptual classification distinctively human powers of conceptual thought are required. But, as just shown, no opponent of mine can afford to adopt this supposition, because behind the case of the child there stands that of the parrot. True, the parrot does not proceed in its receptual classification further than to extend its name for a particular dog to other living dogs; but if any one were foolish enough to stake his whole argument on so slender a distinction as this—to maintain that at the place where the connotation of a child first surpasses that of a parrot we have evidence of a psychological distinction of kind, on the sole ground that the child has begun to surpass the parrot—it would be enough for me to remark that not every parrot will thus extend its denotative sign from one dog to another of greatly unlike appearance. Different birds display different degrees of intelligence in this respect. Most of them will say Bow-wow, will bark, or utter any other denotative sign which they may have learnt or invented, when they see dogs more or less resembling the one to which the denotative sign was originally applied; but it is not every parrot which will thus extend the sign from a terrier to a mastiff or a Newfoundland. Therefore, if any one were to maintain that the difference between the intelligence which can discern, and one which cannot discern, the likeness of a dog in the image or the picture of a dog, is a difference of kind, consistency should lead him to draw a similar distinction between the intelligence which can discern, and one which cannot discern, the likeness of a terrier to a mastiff. But, if so, the intelligence of one parrot would be different in kind from that of another parrot; and the child’s intelligence at one age would differ in kind from the intelligence of that same child when a week or two older—both of which statements would be manifestly absurd. The truth can only be that up to the point where the intelligence of the child surpasses that of the bird they are both in the receptual stage of sign-making; and that the only reason why the child does surpass the bird is not, in the first instance, because the child there suddenly attains the power of conceptual ideation, but because it gradually attains a higher level of receptual ideation. This admits of direct proof from the fact that animals more intelligent than parrots are unquestionably able to recognize sculptured and even pictorial representations: hence there can be no doubt that if talking birds had attained a similar level of intelligence—or if the other and more intelligent animals had been able, like the talking birds, to use denotative signs,—the child would not have parted company with the brute at quite so early a stage of receptual nomenclature.[108]

What, then, are we to say about the faculty of judgment in relation to these three stages of ideation—namely, the receptual, pre-conceptual, and conceptual? We can only institute the parallel and consequent distinction between judgment as receptual, pre-conceptual, and conceptual.[109] As now so often stated, the distinguishing features of a judgment as fully displayed in any act of formal predication, are the bringing together in self-conscious thought of two concepts, and the distinguishing of some relation between them as such. Therefore we do not say that a brute judges when, without any self-conscious thought, it brings together certain reminiscences of its past experience in the form of recepts, and translates for us the results of its ideation by the performance of what Mr. Mivart calls “practical inferences.” Therefore, also, if a brute which is able to name each of two recepts separately (as is done by a talking bird), were to name the two recepts simultaneously when thus combined in an act of “practical inference,” although there would then be the outward semblance of a proposition, we should not be strictly right in calling it a proposition. It would, indeed, be the statement of a truth perceived; but not the statement of a truth perceived as true.[110]

Now, if all this be admitted in the case of a brute—as it must be by any one who takes his stand on the faculty of true or conceptual judgment,—obviously it must also be admitted in the case of the growing child. In other words, if it can be proved that a child is able to state a truth before it can state a truth as true, it is thereby proved that in the psychological history of every human being there is first the incompleted kind of judgment required for dealing with receptual knowledge, and so for stating truths perceived, and next the completed judgment, which deals with conceptual knowledge, and so is enabled to state truths perceived as true. Of course the condition to the raising of this lower kind of judgment (if for convenience we agree so to term it) into the higher, is given by the advent of self-consciousness; and therefore the place where statement of truth passes into predication of truth must be determined by the place at which this kind of consciousness first supervenes. Where it does first supervene we shall presently have to consider. Meanwhile I am but endeavouring to make clear the fact that, unless my opponents abandon their position altogether, they must allow that there is some difference to be recognized between the connotative powers of a parrot and the connotative powers of a man. But if they do allow this, they must further allow that between the place where the connotative powers of a child first surpass those of a parrot, and the place where those powers first become truly conceptual, there is a large tract of ideation which it is impossible to ignore. In order, therefore, not to prejudice the question before us, I have thus far confined myself to a mere designation of these great and obvious distinctions. But seeing that even this preliminary step has necessitated a great deal of explanation, I feel it may conduce to clearness if I end the present chapter with a tabular statement of the sundry distinctions in question.

By receptual judgments I will understand the same order of ideation as Mr. Mivart expresses by his term “practical inferences of brutes,” instances of which have already been given in Chapter III.

By pre-conceptual judgments I will understand those acts of virtual or rudimentary judgment which are performed by children subsequent to the “practical inferences” which they share with brutes, but prior to the advent of self-conscious reflection. These pre-conceptual judgments may be expressed either by gestures, connotative classifications, or by both combined. Some instances of them have already been given in the present chapter: further and better instances will be given in the chapters which are to follow.

By conceptual judgments I will understand full and complete judgments in the ordinary acceptation of this term.

Receptual judgment, then, has to do with recepts; pre-conceptual judgment with pre-concepts; and true judgments with true concepts. Or, conversely stated, receptual knowledge leads to receptual judgment (e.g. when a sea-bird dives into water but alights upon land): pre-conceptual knowledge leads to pre-conceptual judgment in the statement of such knowledge (e.g. when a child, by extending the name of a dog to the picture of a dog, virtually affirms, though it does not conceive, the resemblance which it perceives): and, lastly, conceptual knowledge leads to conceptual or veritable judgment, in the statement of such knowledge known as knowledge (e.g. when, in virtue of his powers of reflective thought, a man not only states a truth, but states that truth as true).

Thus far I doubt whether my opponents will find it easy to meet me. They may, of course, cavil at some or all of the above distinctions; but, if so, it is for them to show cause for complaint. They have raised objections to the theory of evolution on purely psychological grounds. I meet their objections upon these their own grounds, and therefore the only way in which they can answer me is by showing that there is something wrong in my psychological analysis. This I fearlessly invite them to do. For all the distinctions which I have made I have made out of consideration to the exigencies of their argument. Although these distinctions may appear somewhat bewilderingly numerous, I do not anticipate that any competent psychologist will complain of them on account of their having been over-finely drawn. For each of them marks off an important territory of ideation, and all the territories so marked off must be separately noted, if the alleged distinction of kind between one and another is to be seriously investigated. In his essays upon the theory of evolution, Mr. Mivart not unfrequently complains of the disregard of psychological analysis which is betokened by any expression of opinion to the effect, that as between one great territory of ideation and another there is only a difference of degree. But surely this complaint comes with an ill grace from a writer who bases an opposite opinion upon a precisely similar neglect—or upon a bare statement of the greatest and most obvious of all the distinctions in psychology, without so much as any attempt to analyze it. Therefore, if my own attempt to do this has erred on the side of overelaboration, it has done so only on account of my desire to do full justice to the opposite side. In the result, I claim to have shown that if it is possible to suggest a difference of kind between any of the levels of ideation which have now been defined, this can only be done at the last of them—or where the advent of self-consciousness enables a mind, not only to know, but to know that it knows; not only to receive knowledge, but also to conceive it; not only to connotate, but also to denominate; not only to state a truth, but also to state that truth as true. The question, therefore, which now lies before us is that as to the nature of this self-consciousness—or, more accurately, whether the great and peculiar distinction which this attribute confers upon the human intellect is to be regarded as a distinction of degree only, or as a distinction of kind. To answer this question we must first investigate the rise of self-consciousness in the only place where its rise can be observed, namely, in the psychogenesis of a child.[111]