510 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the recept, we must accordingly inquire into fhe psychological 

 conditions and concomitants of the naming process. And this 

 our author does at some length. He gives us a full and detailed 

 account of names and of signs in general, distinguishing different 

 grades of sign-making from the merely indicative pointing or 

 other gesture up to the bestowal of a general symbol with a con- 

 sciousness of its significance as connoting certain common quali- 

 ties. Into much of this it is not needful for us to follow Dr. Ro- 

 manes, but brief reference may be made to one or two points of 

 special importance as bearing on the evolution of the higher con- 

 ceptual thought. One of the most curious features of Dr. Ro- 

 manes's theory of concepts and naming is the proposition that the 

 name is bestowed on the idea, and has for its psychological con- 

 dition an act of introspection. He tells us that before we can 

 bestow a name on a recept we must be able to set this recept be- 

 fore our mind as an object of our own thought. Or, to express 

 the truth in the author's own words, self-consciousness is the 

 necessary presupposition of naming and so of conceptual thought. 

 Before I can name an idea I must reflect on the idea as mine, and 

 before I can judge in the logical sense, I must realize the truth of 

 the proposition as such, that is presumably as truth for me, so 

 that self-consciousness would seem to come in necessarily at all 

 stages of conceptual thought. 



This doctrine seems by no means as clear and convincing as 

 the author supposes. He is, as he clearly tells us, confining him- 

 self to the psychological treatment of his subject. This being so, 

 it may fairly be urged that in making an act of subjective intro- 

 spection an essential factor in the process of naming he is psycho- 

 logically wrong. Is a child when inventing a name for his toy- 

 horse or doll reflecting on his idea as his and naming this idea ? 

 Is he not rather thinking wholly about the object, and is not the 

 name given to this external object and not to the idea in the 

 namer's mind at all ? * No doubt the completed process of logical 

 reflection on names and propositions brings in the subjective ele- 

 ment — that is to say the mind's consciousness of its ideas and 

 judgments as representations of the realities thought about. But 

 this reference to self, this act of introspection, so far from being 

 involved in every act of conceptual thought, is directly excluded 

 from it. 



This brings one to the next point. In naming things the mind 

 is busily occupied, not with itself and its ideas, but with the "not- 

 self," the qualities and relations of the things perceived or rep- 



* I believe that observers of children -will indorse the remark that children regard 

 names as objective realities mysteriously bound up with the things, and in a manner 

 necessary to them. A nameless object is, for a child, something incomplete — almost 

 uncanny. 



