IS MAN THE ONLY BE AS ONER? 513 



both; Surely if a sound is used for the purpose of marking re- 

 semblances and attributing qualities, it is a genuine name, and 

 the mental process underlying it is a germ of true conceptual 

 thought. To say that the parrot attributes qualities, and attrib- 

 utes them in a " classificatory " way too, seems indeed to mean 

 that the bird has got a considerable way along the conceptual 

 path, and is fairly within sight of our distinctions of thing and 

 quality, individual and class. Why logical reflection on this 

 name as such should be needed to raise such a performance to the 

 dignity of a true conceptual act, one is at a loss to understand. 

 And, indeed, the author himself appears to recognize all this in a 

 dim way at least, when he adds that the connotative sign may be 

 the accompaniment not only of receptual but of truly conceptual 

 ideation. At the same time this addition may very well complete 

 the reader's perplexity, for it appears to render the next stage of 

 evolution, the denominative sign, unnecessary. 



Altogether the author's account of sign-accompanied ideation 

 is not quite satisfactory. To begin with, one misses an adequate 

 psychological treatment of signs in general, their nature and 

 function in our mental processes, such as M. Taine has given us 

 in the beginning of his work On Intelligence. Then our author 

 has left us very much in the dark as to what it is that the sign 

 does for the intellective process, when it begins to be used. On 

 the one hand, since we are told that the mere addition of a name 

 transforms the generic image into a " concept," we naturally ex- 

 pect the function of the sign to be a large and important one. On 

 the other hand, we gather that signs can be used at the level of 

 receptual ideation, where, consequently, true conceptual thought 

 is wholly excluded. 



This confusion seems to have its main source in the curious 

 theory that while an idea may be general, it can not become a 

 true concept till it is introspectively regarded as our idea ; and its 

 counterpart, that while a sign may be a true sign and even sub- 

 serve the attribution of qualities to objects, it can not grow into 

 the full stature of a name till it is reflected on as a name. By this 

 doctrine Dr. Romanes seems unwittingly to have substituted the 

 logical for the psychological definition of the concept, and so to 

 have put the latter higher up in the evolutional scale than it 

 ought to be. To this it must be added that the author appears 

 to have been overanxious, with the view of making the transit 

 smooth, to multiply distinctions. Such intermediate forms as Dr. 

 Romanes here attempts to interpolate in the process of intellect- 

 ual development can not in truth do away with the broad distinc- 

 tions which psychologists are in the habit of drawing. Thus the 

 recept only appears to connect the image and the concept just be- 

 cause it tries to be both at the same time. So the lower stadium 



TOL. XL. — 36 



