168 MENTAL EVOLUriOX IX MAX. 



fidently, that the distinction in question — i.e. between animal 

 and human intelligence — may be easily proved to occur 

 further back than at the faculty of predication, or the forming 

 of a proposition. The distinction occurs at the faculty of 

 denomination, or the bestowing of a name, known as such. 

 " The simplest element of thought " is 7iot a "Judgment:" the 

 simplest element of thought is a concept. That this is the 

 case admits of being easily demonstrated in several different 

 ways. 



In the first place, it is evident that there could be no 

 judgments without concepts, just as there could bono proposi- 

 tions without terms. A judgment is the result of a comparison 

 of concepts, and this is the reason why it can only find ex- 

 pression in a proposition, which sets forth the relation between 

 the concepts by bringing into apposition their corresponding 

 terms. Judgments, therefore, are coniponnds of thought : 

 the elements are concepts. 



In the second place, given the power of conceiving, and 

 the germ of judgment is implied, though not expanded into 

 the blossom of formal predication. For whenever we 

 bestow a name we are implicitly judging that the thing to 

 which we apply the name presents the attributes connoted by 

 that name, and thus we are virtually predicating the fact. For 

 example, when I call a man a "Negro," the very term itself 

 affirms blackness as the distinctive quality of that individual 

 — ^just as does the equivalent nurser}^ term, " IMack-man." To 

 utter the name Negro, therefore, or the name Black-man, is to 

 form and pronounce at least two judgments touching an indi- 

 vidual object of sensuous perception — to wit, that it is a man, 

 and that he is black. The judgments so formed and pro- 

 nounced are doubtless not so explicit as is the case when both 

 subject and predicate are associated in the full proposition — 

 "A negro is black ;" but in the single term Negro, or Black- 

 man, both these elements were already present, and must 

 have been so if the name were in any degree at all concep- 

 tual — i.e. denominative as distinguished from denotative. In 

 the illustration "Negro," or " Black-man," it so happens that the 



