THE TRANSITION IN THE INDIVIDUAL.

We are now, I think, in possession of sufficient material to begin our answer to the question with which we set out—namely, Is it conceivable that the human mind can have arisen by way of a natural genesis from the minds of the higher quadrumana? I maintain that the material now before us is sufficient to show, not only that this is conceivable, but inevitable.

First of all we must remember that we share in common with the lower animals not only perceptual, but also what I have termed receptual life. Thus far, no difference of kind can be even so much as suggested. The difference then, be it one of kind or of degree, concerns only those superadded elements of psychology which are peculiar to man, and which, following other psychologists, I have termed conceptual. I say advisedly the elements, because it is by no one disputed that all differences of conceptual life are differences of degree, or that from the ideation of a savage to that of a Shakespeare there is unquestionably a continuous ascent. The only question, then, that obtains is as to the relation between the highest recept of a brute and the lowest concept of a man.

Now, in considering this question we must first remember to what an extraordinarily high level of adaptive ideation the purely receptual life of brutes is able to carry them. If we contrast the ideation of my cebus, which honestly investigated the mechanical principle of a screw, and then applied his specially acquired knowledge to screws in general—if we contrast this ideation with that of palÆolithic man, who for untold thousands of years made no advance upon the chipping of flints, we cannot say that, when gauged by the practical test of efficiency or adaptation, the one appears to be very much in advance of the other. Or, if we remember that these same men never hit upon the simple expedient of attaching a chipped flint to a handle, so as to make a hatchet out of a chisel,[129] it cannot be said that in the matter of mechanical discovery early conceptual life displayed any great advance upon the high receptual life of my cebus. Nevertheless, I have allowed—nay insisted—that no matter how elaborate the structure of receptual knowledge may be, or how wonderful the adaptive action it may prompt, a “practical inference” or “receptual judgment” is always separated from a conceptual inference or true judgment by the immense distinction that it is not itself an object of knowledge. No doubt it is a marvellous fact that by means of receptual knowledge alone a monkey should be able to divine the mechanical principle of a screw, and afterwards apply his discovery to all cases of screws. But even here there is nothing to show that the monkey ever thought about the principle as a principle; indeed, we may rest well assured that he cannot possibly have done so, seeing that he was not in possession of the intellectual instruments—and, therefore, of the antecedent conditions—requisite for the purpose. All that the monkey did was to perceive receptually certain analogies: but he did not conceive them, or constitute them objects of thought as analogies. He was, therefore, unable to predicate the discovery he had made, or to set before his own mind as knowledge the knowledge which he had gained.

Or, to take another illustration, the bird which saw three men go into a building, and inferred that one must still have remained when only two came out, conducted the inference receptually: the only data she had were those supplied by differential sense-perceptions. But although these data were sufficient for the purpose of conducting what Mr. Mivart calls a “practical inference,” and so of enabling her to know that a man still remained behind, they were clearly not enough to enable her to know the numerical relations as relations, or in any way to predicate to herself, 3-2=1. In order to do this, the bird would have required to quit the region of receptual knowledge, and rise to that of conceptual: she would have required in some form or another to have substituted symbols for ideas. It makes no difference, so far as this distinction is concerned, when we learn that in dealing with certain savages “each sheep must be paid for separately: thus, suppose two sticks of tobacco to be the rate of exchange for one sheep, it would sorely puzzle a Dammara to take two sheep and give him four sticks.”[130] All that such facts show is that in some respects the higher receptual life of brutes attains almost as high a level of ideation as the lower conceptual life of man; and although this fact no doubt greatly lessens the difficulty which my opponents allege as attaching to the supposition that the two were genetically continuous, it does not in itself dispose of the psychological distinction between a recept and a concept.

This distinction, as we have now so often seen, consists in a recept being an idea which is not itself an object of knowledge, whereas a concept, in virtue of having been named by a self-conscious agent, is an idea which stands before the mind of that agent as an idea, or as a state of mind which admits of being introspectively contemplated as such. But although we have in this distinction what I agree with my opponents in regarding as the greatest single distinction that is to be met with in psychology, I altogether object to their mode of analyzing it. For what they do is to take the concept in its most highly developed form, and then contrast this with the recept of an animal. Nay, as we have seen, they even go beyond a concept, and allege that “the simplest element of thought” is a judgment as bodied forth in a proposition—i.e. two concepts plus the predication of a relationship between them! Truly, we might as well allege that the simplest element of matter is H₂SO₄, or the simplest element of sound a bar of the C Minor Symphony. Obviously, therefore, or as a mere matter of the most rudimentary psychological analysis, if we say that the simplest element of thought is a judgment, we must extend the meaning of this word from the mental act concerned in full predication, to the mental act concerned in the simplest conception.

And not only so. Not only have my opponents committed the slovenly error of regarding a predicative judgment as “the simplest element of thought;” they have also omitted to consider that even a concept requires to be analyzed with respect to its antecedents, before this the really simplest element of thought can be pointed to as proving a psychological distinction of kind in the only known intelligence which presents it. Now, the result of my analysis of the concept has been to show that it is preceded by what I have termed pre-concepts, which admit of being combined into what I have termed nascent, rudimentary, or pre-conceptual judgments. In other words, we have seen that the receptual life of man reaches a higher level of development than the receptual life of brutes, even before it passes into that truly conceptual phase which is distinguished by the presence of self-conscious reflection. In order, therefore, to mark off this higher receptual life of a human being from the lower receptual life of a brute, I have used the terms just mentioned.

So much, then, for these several stages of ideation, which I have now reiterated ad nauseam. Turning next to my analysis of their several modes of expression, or of their translation into their severally equivalent systems of signs, we have seen that many of the lower animals are able to communicate their recepts by means of gestures significant of objects, qualities, actions, desires, &c.; and that in the only case where they are able to articulate, they so communicate their recepts by means of words. Therefore, in a sense, these animals may be said to be using names; but, in order not to confuse this kind of naming with that which is distinctive of conceptual thought, I have adopted the scholastic terminology, and called the former kind of naming an act of denotating, as distinguished from an act of denominating. Furthermore, seeing that denotative language is able, as above observed, to signify qualities and actions as well as objects, it follows that in the higher receptual (i.e. pre-conceptual) stages of ideation, denotative language is able to construct what I have termed pre-conceptual propositions. These differ from true or conceptual propositions in the absence of true self-consciousness on the part of the speaker, who therefore, while communicating receptual knowledge, or stating truths, cannot yet know his own knowledge, or state the truths as true. But it does not appear that a pre-conceptual proposition differs from a conceptual one in any other respect, while it does appear that the one passes gradually into the other with the rise of self-consciousness in every growing child. Now, if all these things are so, we are entitled to affirm that analysis has displayed an uninterrupted transition between the denotation of a brute and the predication of a man. For the mere fact that it is the former phase alone which occurs in the brute, while in the man, after having run a parallel course of development, this phase passes into the other—the mere fact that this is so cannot be quoted as evidence that a similar transition never took place in the psychological history of our species, unless it could be shown that when the transition takes place in the psychological history of the individual, it does so in such a sudden and remarkable manner as of itself to indicate that the intellect of the individual has there and then undergone a change of kind.

Such being an outline sketch of my argument, I will now proceed to fill in the details, taking in historical order the various stages of ideation which I have named—i.e. the receptual, the pre-conceptual, and the conceptual.

Seeing that this is, as I apprehend, the central core of the question, I will here furnish some additional instances of receptual and pre-conceptual ideation as expressed by denotative and connotative signs on the part of a child which I carefully observed for the purpose.

At eighteen months old my daughter, who was late in beginning to speak, was fond of looking at picture-books, and as already stated in a previous chapter, derived much pleasure from naming animals therein represented,—saying Ba for a sheep, Moo for a cow, uttering a grunt for a pig, and throwing her head up and down with a bray for a horse or an ass. These several sounds and gestures she had been taught by the nurse as noun-substantives, and she correctly applied them in every case, whether the picture-book happened to be one with which she was familiar or one which she had never seen before; and she would similarly name all kinds of animals depicted on the wall-paper, chair-covers, &c., in strange houses, or, in short, whenever she met with representations of objects the nursery names of which she knew. Thus there is no doubt that, long before she could form a sentence, or in any proper sense be said to speak, this child was able to denote objects by voice and gesture. At this time, also, she correctly used a limited number of denotative words significant of actions—i.e. active verbs.

Somewhat later by a few weeks she showed spontaneously the faculty of expressing an adjective. Her younger brother she had called “Ilda,” and soon afterwards she extended the name to all young children.[131] Later still, while looking over her picture-books, whenever she came upon a representation of a sheep with lambs, she would point to the sheep and say Mama-Ba, while to the lambs she would say Ilda-Ba. Similarly with ducks and ducklings, hens and chickens, and indeed with all the animals to which she had given names. Here it is evident that Ilda served to convey the generic idea of Young, and so, from having been originally used as a proper or denotative name, was now employed as an adjective or connotative name. But although it expressed a quality, the quality was one of so sensible a kind that the adjective amounted to virtually the same thing as substantive, so far as any faculty of abstraction was concerned: it was equivalent to the word Baby, when by connotative extension this comes to be used as an adjective in the apposition Baby-Ba for a lamb, &c.

Almost contemporaneously with the acquisition of adjectives, this child began to learn the use of a few passive verbs, and words significant of certain states of feeling; she also added to her vocabulary a few prepositions indicating space relations, such as Up, Down, &c.[132]

While these advances were being made, a general progress of the sign-making faculty was also, and even more conspicuously, shown in another direction. For speech, in the sense of formal predication, not having yet begun, the development in question took place in the region of gesture. She was then (two years) able to express a great many simple ideas by the combined use of gesture-signs, vocal-tones, and a large connotative extension of her words. The gesture-signs, however, were still of the simplest or most receptual order, such as pulling one by the dress to open a door, pointing to a tumbler to signify her desire for a drink, &c. That is to say, the indicative stage of language largely coincided with, or overlapped, the earliest phases of the denotative and receptually connotative. I have already said that this indicative stage of language constituted the earliest appearance of the sign-making faculty which I observed in my own children, at a time when the only desire expressed seemed to be that of being taken to the object indicated; and, so far as I can ascertain, this is universally true of all children. But the point now is, that when the logic recepts had become more full, the desires expressed by pointing became of a more and more varied kind, until, at the age of two and a half (i.e. after significant articulation or true word-making had well set in), the indicative phase of language developed into regular pantomime, as the following instance will show. Coming into the house after having bathed in the sea for the first time, she ran to me to narrate her novel experience. This she did by first pointing to the shore, then pretending to take off her clothes, to walk into the sea, and to dip: next, passing her hands up the body to her head, she signified that the water had reached as high as her hair, which she showed me was still wet. The whole story was told without the use of a single articulate sound.

Now, in the case of these illustrations (and many more of the same kind might be added if needful), we find the same general fact exemplified—namely, that the earliest phase of language in the young child is that which I have called the indicative,—i.e. tones and gestures significant of feelings, objects, qualities, and actions. This indicative phase of language, or sign-making, lasts much longer in some children than in others (particularly in those who are late in beginning to speak); and the longer it lasts the more expressive does it become of advancing ideation. But in all cases two things have to be observed in connection with it. The first is that, in its earliest stages, and onwards through a considerable part of its history, it is precisely identical with the corresponding phases of indicative sign-making in the lower animals. Thus, for instance, Professor Preyer observed that at sixteen months his own child—who at that age could not speak a word—used to make a gesture significant of petitioning with its hands (“Bittbewegung”), as indicative of desire for something to be done. This, of course, I choose as an instance of indicative sign-making at a comparatively high level of development; but it is precisely paralleled by an intelligent dog which “begs” before a water-jug to signify his desire for a drink, or before any other object in connection with which he desires something to be done.[133] And so it is with children who pull one’s dress towards a closed door through which they wish to pass, significantly cry for what they want to possess, or to have done for them, &c.: children are here doing exactly what cats and dogs will do under similar circumstances.[134] And although many of the gesture-signs of children at this age (i.e. up to about eighteen months) are not precisely paralleled by those of the lower animals, it is easy to see that where there is any difference it is due to different circumstances of bodily shape, social conditions, &c.: it is not due to any difference of ideation. That the kind of ideation which is expressed by the indicative gestures of young children is the same as that which prompts the analogous gestures of brutes, is further shown by the fact that, even before any articulate words are uttered, the infant (like the animal) will display an understanding of many articulate words when uttered in its presence, and (also like the animal) will respond to such words by appropriate gestures. For instance, again to quote Preyer, he found that his hitherto speechless infant was able correctly to point to certain colours which he named; and although, as far as I am aware, no one has ever tried to teach an animal to do this, we know that trained dogs will display an even better understanding of words by means of appropriate gestures.[135]

The other point which has to be noticed in connection with these early stages of indicative sign-making in the young child is that, sooner or later, they begin to overlap the earliest stage of articulate sign-making, or verbal denotation. In other words, denotative sign-making never begins to occur until indicative sign-making has advanced considerably; and when denotative sign-making does begin, it advances parallel with indicative: that is to say, both kinds of sign-making then proceed to develop simultaneously. But when the vocabulary of denotation has been sufficiently enriched to enable the child to dispense with the less efficient material furnished by indication, indicative signs gradually become starved out by denotative, and words replace gestures.

So far, then, as the earliest or indicative phase of language is concerned, no difference even of degree can be alleged between the infant and the animal. Neither can any such difference be alleged with respect to the earliest exhibitions of the next phases of language, namely, the denotative and receptually connotative. For we have seen that the only animals which happen to be capable of imitating articulate sounds will use these sounds with a truly denotative significance. Moreover, as we have also seen, within moderate limits they will even extend such denotative significance to other objects seen to belong to the same class or kind—thus raising the originally denotative sign to an incipiently connotative value. And although these receptually connotative powers of a parrot are soon surpassed by those of a young child, we have further seen that this is merely owing to the rapid advance in the degree of receptual life which takes place in the latter—or, in other words, that if a parrot resembled a dog in being able to see the resemblance between objects and their pictures, and also in being so much more able to understand the meanings of words, then, without doubt, their connotative extension of names would proceed further than it does; and hence in this matter the parallel between a parrot and child would proceed further than it does. The only reason, therefore, why a child thus gradually surpasses a parrot in the matter of connotation, is because the receptual life of a child gradually rises to that of a dog—as I have already proved by showing that the indicative or gesture-signs used by a child after it has thus surpassed the parrot, are psychologically identical with those which are used by a dog. Moreover, where denotation is late in beginning and slow in developing—as in the case of my own daughter—these indicative signs admit, as we have seen, of becoming much more highly perfected, so that under these circumstances a child of two years will perform a little pantomime for the purpose of relating its experiences. Now, this fact enables me to dispense with the imaginary comparison of a dog that is able to talk, or of a parrot as intelligent as a dog; for the fact furnishes me with the converse case of a child not able to talk at the usual age. No one can suggest that the intelligence of such a child at two years old differs in kind from that of another child of the same age, who, on account of having been earlier in acquiring the use of words, can afford to become less proficient in the use of gestures.[136] The case of a child late in talking may therefore be taken as a psychological index of the development of human ideation of the receptual order, which by accident admits of closer comparison with that of the higher mammalia than is possible in the case of a child who begins to talk at the usual age. But, as regards the former case, we have already seen that the gestures begin by being much less expressive than those of a dog, then gradually improve until they become psychologically identical, and, lastly, continue in the same gradual manner along the same line of advance. Therefore, if in this case no difference of kind can be alleged until the speaking age is reached, neither can it be alleged after the speaking age is reached in the case where this happens to be earlier. Or, in the words previously used, if a dog like a parrot were able to use verbal signs, or if a parrot were equal in intelligence to a dog, the connotative powers of a child would continue parallel with those of a brute through a somewhat longer reach of psychological development than we now find to be the case.

Remembering, then, that brutes so low in the psychological scale as talking birds reach the level of denotating objects, qualities, &c.; remembering that some of these birds will extend their denotative names to objects and qualities conspicuously belonging to the same class; remembering, further, that all children before they begin to speak have greatly distanced the talking birds in respect of indicative language or gesture-signs, while some children (or those late in beginning to speak) will raise this form of language to the level of pantomime, thus proving that the receptual ideation of infants just before they begin to speak is invariably above that of talking birds, and often far above that of any other animal;—remembering all these things, I say it would indeed be a most unaccountable fact if children, soon after they do begin to speak, did not display a great advance upon the talking birds in their use of denotative signs, and also in their extension of such signs into connotative words. As we have seen, it must be conceded by all prudent adversaries that, before he is able to use any of these signs, an infant is moving in the receptual sphere of ideation, and that this sphere is already (between one and two years) far above that of the parrot. Yet, like the parrot, one of the first uses that he makes of these signs is in the denotation of individual objects, &c. Next, like the more intelligent parrots, he extends the meaning of his denotative names to objects most obviously resembling those which were first designated. And from that point onwards he rapidly advances in his powers of connotative classification. But can it be seriously maintained, in view of all the above considerations, that this rapid advance in the powers of connotative classification betokens any difference of kind between the ideation of the child and that of the bird? If it is conceded (as it must be unless my opponents commit argumentative suicide), that before he could speak at all the infant was confined to the receptual sphere of ideation, and that within this sphere his ideation was already superior to the ideation of a bird,—this is merely to concede that analogies must strike the child which are somewhat too remote to strike the bird. Therefore, while the bird will only extend its denotative name from one kind of dog to another, the child, after having done this, will go on to apply the name to an image, and, lastly, to the picture of a dog. Surely no one will be fatuous enough to maintain that here, at the commencement of articulate sign-making, there is any evidence of generic distinction between the human mind and the mind of even so poor a representative of animal psychology as we meet with in a parrot. But, if no such distinction is to be asserted here, neither can it be asserted anywhere else, until we arrive at the stage of human ideation where the mind is able to contemplate that ideation as such. So far, therefore, as the stages which we are now considering are concerned (i.e. the denotative and receptually connotative), I submit that my case is made out. And yet these are really the most important stages to be clear about; for, on account of their having been ignored by nearly all writers who argue that there is a difference of kind between man and brute, the most important—because the initial—stages of transition have been lost sight of, and the fully developed powers of human thought contrasted with their low beginnings in the brute creation, without any attention having been paid to the probable history of their development. Hitherto, so far as I can find, no psychologist has presented clearly the simple question whether the faculty of naming is always and necessarily co-extensive with that of thinking the names; and, therefore, the two faculties have been assumed to be one and the same. Yet, as I have shown in an earlier chapter, even in the highest forms of human ideation we habitually use names without waiting to think of them as names—which proves that even in the highest regions of ideation the two faculties are not necessarily coincident.[137] And here I have further shown that, whether we look to the brute or to the human being, we alike find that the one faculty is in its inception wholly independent of the other—that there are connotative names before there are any denominative thoughts, and that these connotative names, when they first occur in brute or child, betoken no further aptitude of ideation than is betokened by those stages in the language of gesture which they everywhere overlap. The named recepts of a parrot cannot be held by my opponents to be true concepts, any more than the indicative gestures of an infant can be held by them to differ in kind from those of a dog.

I submit, then, that neither as regards the indicative, the denotative, nor the connotative stages of sign-making is it argumentatively possible to allege any difference of kind between animal and human intelligence—apart, I mean, from any evidence of self-consciousness in the latter, or so long as the intelligence of either is moving in what I have called the receptual sphere. Let us, then, next consider what I have called the pre-conceptual stage of ideation, or that higher receptual life of a child which, while surpassing the receptual life of any brute, has not yet attained to the conceptual life of a man.

From what I have already said it must, I should suppose, be now conceded that, at the place where the receptual life of a child first begins to surpass the receptual life of any other mammal, no psychological difference of kind can be affirmed. Let us, therefore, consent to tap this pre-conceptual life at a considerably higher level, and analyze the quality of ideation which flows therefrom: let us consider the case of a child about two years old, who is able to frame such a rudimentary, communicative, or pre-conceptual proposition as Dit ki (Sister is crying). At this age, as already shown, there is no consciousness of self as a thinking agent, and, therefore, no power of stating a truth as true. Dit is the denotative name of one recept, ki the denotative name of another: the object and the action which these two recepts severally represent happen to occur together before the child’s observation: the child therefore denotes them both simultaneously—i.e. brings than into apposition. This it does by merely following the associations previously established between the recept of a familiar object with its denotative name dit, and the recept of a frequent action with its denotative name ki. The apposition in consciousness of these two recepts, with their corresponding denotations, is thus effected for the child by what may be termed the logic of events: it is not effected by the child in the way of any intentional or self-conscious grouping of its ideas, such as we have seen to constitute the distinguishing feature of the logic of concepts.

Such being the state of the facts, I put to my opponents the following dilemma. Either you here have judgment, or else you have not. If you hold that this is judgment, you must also hold that animals judge, because I have proved a ready that (according to your own doctrine as well as mine) the only point wherein it can be alleged that the faculty of judgment differs in animals and in man consists in the presence or absence of self-consciousness. If, on the other hand, you answer that here you have not judgment, inasmuch as you have not self-consciousness, I will ask you at what stage in the subsequent development of the child’s intelligence you would consider judgment to arise? If to this you answer that judgment first arises when self-consciousness arises, I will ask you to note that, as already proved, the growth of self-consciousness is itself a gradual process; so that, according to your present limitation of the term judgment, it becomes impossible to say when this faculty does arise. In point of fact, it grows by stages, pari passu with the growth of self-consciousness. But, if so, where the faculty of stating a truth perceived passes into the higher faculty of perceiving the truth as true, there must be a continuous series of gradations connecting the one faculty with the other. Up to the point where this series of gradations begins, we have seen that the mind of an animal and the mind of a man are parallel, or not distinguishable from each other by any one principle of psychology. Will you, then, maintain that up to this time the two orders of psychical existence are identical in kind, but that during its ascent through this final series of gradations the human mind in some way becomes distinct in kind, not merely from the mind of animals, but also from its own previous self? If so, I must at this point part company with you in argument, because at this point your argument ends in a contradiction. If A and B are affirmed to be similar in origin or kind, and if B is affirmed to grow into C—or to differ from both A and B only in degree,—it becomes a contradiction further to affirm that C differs from A in kind. Therefore I submit that, so far as the pre-conceptual stage of ideation is concerned, it is still argumentatively impossible for my opponents to show that there is any psychological difference of kind between man and brute.

As regards this stage of ideation, then, I claim to have shown that, just as there is a pre-conceptual kind of naming, wherein originally denotative words are progressively extended through considerable degrees of connotative meaning; so there is a pre-conceptual kind of predication, wherein denotative and connotative terms are brought together without any conceptual cognizance of the relation thus virtually alleged between them. For I have proved in the last chapter that it is not until its third year that a child acquires true or conceptual self-consciousness, and therefore attains the condition to true or conceptual predication. Yet long before that time, as I have also proved, the child forms what I have called rudimentary, or pre-conceptual, and, therefore, unthinking propositions. Such propositions, then, are statements of truth made for the practical purposes of communication; but they are not statements of truth as true, and therefore not, strictly speaking, propositions at all. They are translations of the logic of recepts; but not of the logic of concepts. For neither the truth so stated, nor the idea thus translated, can ever have been placed before the mind as itself an object of thought. In order to have been thus placed, the mind must have been able to dissociate this its product from the rest of its structure—or, as Mr. Mivart says, to make the things affirmed “exist beside the judgment, not in it.” And, in order to do this, the mind must have attained to self-consciousness. But, as just remarked, such is not yet the case with a child of the age in question; and hence we are bound to conclude that before there is judgment or predication in the sense understood by psychologists (conceptual), there is judgment and predication of a lower order (pre-conceptual), wherein truths are stated for the sake of communicating simple ideas, while the propositions which convey them are not themselves objects of thought. And, be it carefully observed, predication of this rudimentary or pre-conceptual kind is accomplished by the mere apposition of denotative signs, in accordance with the general principles of association. A being the denotative name of an object a, and B the denotative name of a quality or action b, when a b occur together in nature, the relation between them is pre-conceptually affirmed by the mere act of bringing into apposition the corresponding denotations A B—an act which is rendered inevitable by the elementary laws of psychological association.[138]

The matter, then, has been reduced to the last of the three stages of ideation which have been marked out for discussion—namely, the conceptual. Now, whether or not there is any difference of kind between the ideation which is capable and the ideation which is not capable of itself becoming an object of thought, is a question which can only be answered by studying the relations that obtain between the two in the case of the growing child. But, as we have seen, when we do study these relations, we find that they are clearly those of a gradual or continuous passage of the one ideation into the other—a passage, indeed, so gradual and continuous that it is impossible, even by means of the closest scrutiny, to decide within wide limits where the one begins and the other ends. Therefore I need not here recur to this point. Having already shown that the very condition to the occurrence of conceptual ideation (namely, self-consciousness) is of gradual development in the growing child, it is needless to show at any greater length that the development of conceptual out of pre-conceptual ideation is of a similarly gradual occurrence. This fact, indeed, is in itself sufficient to dispose of the allegation of my opponents—namely, that there is evidence of receptual ideation differing from conceptual in origin or kind. Only if it could be shown—either that the receptual ideation of an infant differs in kind from that of an animal, or that the pre-conceptual ideation of a child so differs from the preceding receptual ideation of the same child, or lastly, that this pre-conceptual ideation so differs from the succeeding conceptual ideation—only if one or other of the alternatives could be proved would my opponents be able to justify their allegation. And, as a mere matter of logic, to prove either of the last two alternatives would involve a complete reconstruction of their argument. For at present their argument goes upon the assumption that throughout all the phases of its development a human mind is one in kind—that it is nowhere fundamentally changed from one order of existence to another. But in case any subtle opponent should suggest that, although I have proved the first of the above three alternatives untenable—and, therefore, that there is no difference even of degree between the mind of an infant and that of an animal,—I have nevertheless ignored the possibility that in the subsequent development of every human being a special miracle may be wrought, which regenerates that mind, gives it a new origin, and so changes it as to kind—in case any one should suggest this, I here entertain the two last alternatives as logically possible. But, even so, as we have now so fully seen, study of the child’s intelligence while passing through its several phases of development yields no shadow of evidence in favour of any of these alternatives; while, on the contrary, it most clearly reveals the fact that transition from each of the levels of ideation to the next above it is of so gradual and continuous a character that it is practically impossible to draw any real lines of demarcation between them. This, then, I say is in itself enough to dispose of the allegation of my opponents, seeing that it shows the allegation to be, not only gratuitous, but opposed to the whole body of evidence which is furnished by a study of the facts. Nevertheless, still restricting ourselves to grounds of psychology alone, there remains two general and important considerations of an independent or supplementary kind, which tend strongly to support my side of the argument. These two considerations, therefore, I will next adduce.

The first consideration is, that although the advance to self-consciousness from lower grades of mental development is no doubt a very great and important matter, it is not so great and important in comparison with what this development is afterwards destined to become, as to make us feel that it constitutes any distinction sui generis—or even, perhaps, the principal distinction—between the man and the brute. For while, on the one hand, we have now fully seen that, given the protoplasm of judgment and of predication as these occur in the young child (or as they may be supposed to have occurred in our semi-human ancestors), and self-consciousness must needs arise; on the other hand, there is evidence to show that when self-consciousness does arise, and even when it is fairly well developed, the powers of the human mind are still in an almost infantile condition. Thus, for instance, I have observed in my own children that, while before their third birthday they employed appropriately and always correctly the terms “I,” “my,” “self,” “myself,” at that age their powers of reasoning were so poorly developed as scarcely to be in advance of those which are exhibited by an intelligent animal. To give only one instance of this. My little girl when four and a half years old—or nearly two years after she had correctly used the terms indicative of true self-consciousness—wished to know what room was beneath the drawing-room of a house in which she had lived from the time of her birth. When she asked me to inform her, I told her to try to think out the problem for herself. She first suggested the bath-room, which was not only above the drawing-room, but also at the opposite side of the house; next she suggested the dining-room, which, although below the drawing-room, was also at the other side of the house; and so on, the child clearly having no power to think out so simple a problem as the one which she had spontaneously desired to solve. From which (as from many other instances on my notes in this connection) I conclude that the genesis of self-consciousness marks a comparatively low level in the evolution of the human mind—as we might expect that it should, if its genesis depends on the not unintelligible conditions which I have endeavoured to explain in the last chapters. But, if so, does it not follow that great as the importance of self-consciousness afterwards proves to be as a condition to the higher development of ideation, in itself, or in its first beginning, it does not betoken any very perceptible improvement upon those powers of pre-conceptual ideation which it immediately follows? In other words, there is thus shown to be even less reason to regard the advent of self-consciousness as marking a psychological difference of kind, than there would be so to regard the advent of those higher powers of conceptual ideation which subsequently—though as gradually—supervene between early childhood and youth. Yet no one has hitherto ventured to suggest that the intelligence of a child and the intelligence of a youth display a difference of kind.

Or, otherwise stated, the psychological interval between my cebus and my child (when the former successfully investigated the mechanical principle of the screw by means of his highly developed receptual faculties, while the latter unsuccessfully attempted to solve a most simple topographical problem by means of her lowly developed conceptual faculties), was assuredly much less than that which afterwards separated the intelligence of my child from this level of its own previous self. Therefore, on merely psychological grounds, I conclude that there would be better—or less bad—reasons for alleging that there is an observable difference of kind between the lowest and the highest levels of conceptual ideation, than there is to allege that any such difference obtains between the lowest level of conceptual ideation and the highest level of receptual.

“The greatest of all distinctions in biology,” when it first arises, is thus seen to lie in its potentiality rather than in its origin. Self-consciousness is, indeed, the condition to an immeasurable change in the mind which presents it; but, in order to become so, it must be itself conditioned: it must itself undergo a long and gradual development under the guiding principles of a natural evolution.

And, now, lastly, the second supplementary consideration which I have to adduce is, that even in the case of a fully developed self-conscious intelligence, both receptual and pre-conceptual ideation continue to play an important part. That is to say, even in the full-summed powers of the human intellect, the three descriptions of ideation which I have distinguished are so constantly and so intimately blended together, that analysis of the adult mind corroborates the fact already yielded by analysis of the infantile mind, namely, that the distinctions (which I have been obliged to draw in order to examine the allegations of my opponents) are all essentially or intrinsically artificial. My position is that Mind is everywhere continuous, and if for purposes of analysis or classification we require to draw lines of demarcation between the lower and the higher faculties thereof, I contend that we should only do so as an evolutionist classifies his animal or vegetable species: higher or lower do not betoken differences of origin, but differences of development. And just as the naturalist finds a general corroboration of this view in the fact that structural and functional characters are carried upwards from lower to higher forms of life, thus knitting them all together in the bonds of organic evolution; so may the psychologist find that even the highest forms of human intelligence unmistakably share the more essential characters met with in the lower, thus bearing testimony to their own lineage in a continuous system of mental evolution.

Let us, then, briefly contemplate the relations that obtain in the adult human mind between the boasted faculties of conceptual judgment, and the lower faculties of non-conceptual. Although I agree with my opponents in holding that predication (in the strict sense of the term) is dependent on introspection, I further hold that not every statement made by adult man is a predication in this sense: the vast majority of our verbal propositions are made for the practical purposes of communication, or without the mind pausing to contemplate the propositions as such in the light of self-consciousness. When I say “A negro is black,” I do not require to think all the formidable array of things that Mr. Mivart says I affirm[139]; and, on the other hand, when I perform an act of conscious introspection, I do not always require to perform an act of mental predication. No doubt in many cases, or in those where highly abstract ideation is concerned, this independence of the two faculties arises from each having undergone so much elaboration by the assistance which it has derived from the other, that both are now, so to speak, in possession of a large body of organized material on which to operate, without requiring, whensoever they are exercised, to build up the structure of this material ab initio. Thus, to take an example, when I say “Heat is a mode of motion,” I am using what is now to me a merely verbal sign which expresses an external fact: I do not require to examine my own ideas upon the abstract terms in the abstract relation which the proposition sets forth. But for the original attainment of these ideas I had to exercise many and complex efforts of conceptual thought, without the previous occurrence of which I should not now have been able to use, with full understanding of its import, this verbal sign. Thus all such predications, however habitual and mechanical they may become, must at some time have required the mind to examine the ideas which they announce. And, similarly, all acts of such mental examination—i.e. all acts of introspection,—however superfluous they may now appear when their known product is used for further acts of mental examination, must originally have required the mind to pause before them and make to itself a definite statement or predication of their meaning.[140]

But although I hold this to be the true explanation of the apparent independence of predication and introspection in all cases of highly abstract thought, I am firmly convinced that in all cases where those lower orders of ideation to which I have so often referred as receptual and pre-conceptual are concerned, the independence is not only apparent, but real. This, indeed, I have already proved must be the case with the pre-conceptual propositions of a young child, inasmuch as such propositions are then made in the absence of self-consciousness, or of the necessary condition to their being in any degree introspective. But the point now is, that even in the adult human mind non-conceptual predication is habitual, and that, in cases where only receptual ideation is concerned, predication of this kind need never have been conceptual. For, as Mill very truly says, “it will be admitted that, by asserting the proposition, we wish to communicate information of that physical fact (namely, that the summit of Chimborazo is white), and are not thinking of the names, except as the necessary means of making that communication. The meaning of the proposition, therefore, is that the individual thing denoted by the subject has the attributes connoted by the predicate.”[141]

Now, if it is thus true that even in ordinary predication we may not require to take conceptual cognizance of the matter predicated—having to do only with the apposition of names immediately suggested by association,—the ideation concerned becomes so closely affiliated with that which is expressed in the lower levels of sign-making, that even if the connecting links were not supplied by the growing child, no one would be justified, on psychological grounds alone, in alleging any difference of kind between one level and another. The object of all sign-making is primarily that of communication, and from our study of the lower animals we know that communication first has to do exclusively with recepts, while from our study of the growing child we know that it is the signs used in the communication of recepts which first lead to the formation of concepts. For concepts are first of all named recepts, known as such; and we have seen in previous chapters that this kind of knowledge (i.e. of names as names) is rendered possible by introspection, which, in turn is reached by the naming of self as an agent. But even after the power of conceptual introspection has been fully reached, demand is not always made upon it for the communication of merely receptual knowledge; and therefore it is that not every proposition requires to be introspectively contemplated as such before it can be made. Given the power of denotative nomination on the one hand, and the power of even the lowest degree of connotative nomination on the other, and all the conditions are furnished to the formation of non-conceptual statements, which differ from true propositions only in that they do not themselves become objects of thought. And the only difference between such a statement when made by a young child, and the same statement when similarly made by a grown man, is that in the former case it is not even potentially capable of itself becoming an object of thought.

Here, then, the psychological examination of my opponents’ position comes to an end. And, in the result, I claim to have shown that in whatever way we regard the distinctively human faculty of conceptual predication, it is proved to be but a higher development of that faculty of receptual communication, the ascending degrees of which admit of being traced through the brute creation up to the level which they attain in a child during the first part of its second year,—after which they continue to advance uninterruptedly through the still higher receptual life of the child, until by further though not less imperceptible growth they pass into the incipiently conceptual life of a human mind—which, nevertheless, is not even then nearly so far removed from the intelligence of the lower animals, as it is from that which in the course of its own subsequent evolution it is eventually destined to become.