1 64 MENTAL EVOLUTION L\ MAN. 



a machinery of predication which, for all purposes of practical 

 life, is almost as efficient as speech. The distinction, therefore, 

 resides in the intellectual powers ; not in the symbols thereof. 

 So that a man means, it matters not by what system of signs 

 he expresses his meaning : the distinction between him and 

 the brute consists in his being able to j/iean a proposition. 

 Now, the kind of mental act whereby a man is thus enabled 

 to mean a proposition is called by psychologists an act of 

 Judgment. Predication, or the making of a proposition, 

 is nothing more nor less than the expression of a judgment ; 

 and a judgment is nothing more nor less than the appre- 

 hension of whatever meaning it may be that a proposition 

 serves to set forth. Therefore, it belongs to the very essence 

 of predication that it should involve a judgment ; and it 

 belongs to the very essence of a judgment that it should 

 admit of being stated in the form of a proposition.* 



* Several writers of repute have habitually used the word "Judgment" in a 

 most unwarrantable manner — Lewes, for instance, making it stand indifferently 

 for an act of sensuous determination and an act of conceptual thought. I may, 

 therefore, here remark that in the following analysis I shall not be concerned with 

 any such gratuitous abuses of the term, but will understand it in the technical sense 

 which it bears in logic and psychology. The extraordinary views which Mr. Huxley 

 has published upon this subject I can only take to be ironical. For instance, he 

 says : — " Ratiocination is resolvable into predication, and predication consists in 

 marking in some way the existence, the co-existence, the succession, the likeness 

 and unlikeness, of things or their ideas. Whatever does this, reasons ; and I see 

 no more ground for denying to it reasoning power, because it is unconscious, than 

 I see for refusing Mr. Babbage's engine the title of a calculating machine on the 

 same grounds" {Critiques and Addresses, p. 281). If this statement were taken 

 seriously, of course the answer would be that Mr. Babbage's engine is called a 

 calculating machine only in a metaphorical sense, seeing that it does not evolve 

 its results by any process at all resembling, or in any way analogous to, those of 

 a human mind. It would be an absurd misstatement to say that a machine 

 either reasons or predicates, only because it "marks in some way the existence, 

 the co-existence, the succession, and the likeness and unlikeness of things." A 

 rising barometer or a striking clock do not predicate, any more than a piece of 

 wood, shrieking beneath a circular saw, feels. To denominate purely mechanical 

 or unconscious action — even though it should take place in a living agent and be 

 perfectly adjustive — reason or predication, would be to confuse physical phenomena 

 with psychical ; and, as I have shown in my previous work, even if it be supposed 

 that the latter are mere "indices" or "shadows" of the former, sHll the fact of 

 their existence tn7ist be recognized ; and the processes in question have reference 

 to them, not to their physical counterjjarts. It is, therefore, just as incorrect to 



