5o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



worthy achievements, and on the other hand to trace the process 

 of human intellection down to its crudest forms in the individual 

 and in the race. 



As it is obviously language which marks off human thought 

 from its analogue in the animal world, our author is naturally 

 concerned to limit the function of language. While allowing as 

 a matter of course that the " conceptual thought " of the logician 

 involves language as its proper instrument or vehicle, he urges 

 that there is a good deal of rudimentary generalizing prior to, 

 and therefore independent of, language. To establish this a care- 

 ful examination of the higher processes of animal " ideation " has 

 to be carried out. In doing this Dr. Romanes introduces a num- 

 ber of psychological distinctions of a somewhat technical kind. 

 Of these the most important perhaps is that between the time- 

 honored concept of the logician and the recept This last corre- 

 sponds to Mr. Galton's generic image or the common image {Ge- 

 meinhild) of the German psychologists. It is an image formed 

 out of a number of slightly dissimilar percepts corresponding 

 to different members of a narrow concrete class, such as dog or 

 water. According to our author, animal reasoning remains on 

 the plane of recepts. It is carried on by pictorial representations. 

 At the same time it involves a process of classification or general- 

 izing. A diving-bird must be supposed to have a generalized idea 

 (recept) of water, a dog a generalized idea of man, and so forth. 

 Nay, more, this receptual ideation enables the animal to reach 

 " unperceived abstractions," as the idea of the quality of hollow- 

 ness in the ground, and even "generic ideas of principles" as 

 when the writer's own monkey having discovered the way to take 

 the handle out of the hearth-brush by unscrewing it, proceeded to 

 apply the principle of the screw to the fire-irons, bell-handle, etc. 



The author's whole account of this receptual ideation or the 

 logic of recepts is interesting and persuasive. He has, it must 

 be owned, clearly made out the existence of a very creditable 

 power among animals of carrying out processes analogous to our 

 own reasonings without any aid from language. Yet a doubt may 

 be entertained whether the author has really got at the bottom 

 of these mental feats. The whole account of the recept is a little 

 unsatisfactory, owing to the circumstance that the writer does 

 not make it quite clear in what sense it involves generalization. 

 He writes in sonje places as if the fact of the generic image hav- 

 ing been formed out of a number of percepts corresponding to 

 different members of a class, e. g., different sheets of water seen 

 by the diving-bird, gives it a general representative character. 

 But this, as indeed Dr. Romanes himself appears to recognize in 

 other places, is by no means a necessary consequence. A generic 

 image may form itself more readily than a particular one, just 



