THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE, 219 



concepts, and sensations without percepts. He maintains that no 

 perception occurs without a generalizing movement. " All percepts 

 are conceptual." This being so, what becomes of the claim that 

 brutes, with feeling and ability to perceive, do not form concepts? 

 And if, as the author reluctantly does in one place, we concede that 

 perception may exist with only " incipient concepts," what should 

 prevent the development of the generalizing power in successive in- 

 dividuals to the degree that it is found in the highest intelligence ? 



The considerations adduced by Professor Miiller on the question of 

 the origin of species, and the descent of man, present nothing, there- 

 fore, for the " Darwinian " to answer, except the fact that man has ar- 

 ticulate language, and brutes do not have it. This fact has been al- 

 lowed its full weight in the great discussions upon the descent of man, 

 of which our limits will not permit us to give even a resume. It is 

 sufficient to remark that whatever strength may lie in the argument 

 from this circumstance, its force is not great enough to countervail the 

 many converging proofs of the Darwinian hypothesis ; and, further, 

 we may safely reiterate with Darwin that " the faculty of articulate 

 speech in itself does not offer any insuperable objection to the belief 

 that man has been developed from some lower animal." Indeed, the 

 wonder is that Professor Miiller's own philosophy of mind should not 

 have caused him to see that the difference between the mind of the 

 brute and the mind of man is one of degree, not of kind. He lays 

 great stress on the unity of mental action. The mind is one in all its 

 exercises. There is no sensation without perception, and so forth, as 

 already instanced. If, then, he can not doubt that a lower animal has 

 some intelligence, the inference must be that the essential characters 

 of the other mental exercises are in the animal's intelligence, at least 

 in embryo. ^Ye may believe that Professor Midler is right in much of 

 ■what he says as to the unity of cognitive exercises. Attention to an 

 object presented, association and representation, are the primary men- 

 tal processes, and each is necessary to the other. Given these, all the 

 products of thought that we designate by such terms as concepts, in- 

 ferences, fictions, memories, are readily explicable and their relations 

 to each other made manifest. The chief difference between the mind 

 of man and that of the brute lies in the complexity of association and 

 representation. Man's inferences reach farther, and his generalizations 

 are higher, more complex, and more abstract. It is the same sort of 

 difference which subsists between the intellectually cultivated man 

 and the savage, though, of course, this difference is greater when we 

 compare man with even the higher brutes. But in the latter the same 

 processes are observable. They attend, they associate, they represent ; 

 they feel and they act ; they have nervous systems ; they have men- 

 tal communication. I see no escape from the conclusion that they 

 generalize, and I would not be at all surprised if it should some time 

 happen that an ape be taught to use articulate language. 



