230 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



A B — an act which is rendered inevitable by the elementary 

 laws of psychological association.* 



The matter, then, has been reduced to the last of the three 

 stages of ideation which have been marked out for discussion 

 — namely, the conceptual. Now, whether or not there is any 

 difference of kind between the ideation which is capable and 

 the ideation which is not capable of itself becoming an object 

 of thought, is a question which can only be answered by 

 studying the relations that obtain between the two in the 

 case of the growing child. But, as we have seen, when we 

 do study these relations, we find that they are clearly those 

 of a gradual or continuous passage of the one ideation into the 

 other — a passage, indeed, so gradual and continuous that it is 

 impossible, even by means of the closest scrutiny, to decide 

 within wide limits where the one begins and the other ends. 

 Therefore I need not here recur to this point. Having 

 already shown that the very condition to the occurrence of 

 conceptual ideation (namely, self-consciousness) is of gradual 

 development in the growing child, it is needless to show at 

 any greater length that the development of conceptual out 

 of pre-conceptual ideation is of a similarly gradual occurrence. 

 This fact, indeed, is in itself sufficient to dispose of the 

 allegation of my opponents — namely, that there is evidence of 

 receptual ideation differing from conceptual in origin or kind. 



* In this connection it is interesting to observe the absence of the copula. 

 Notwithstanding the strongly imitative tendencies of a child's mind, and notwith- 

 standing that our English children hear the copula expressed in almost every 

 statement that is made to them, their own propositions, while still in the pre- 

 conceptual phase, dispense with it (see above, p. 204). In thus trusting to 

 apposition alone, without expressing any sign of relation, the young child is 

 conveying in spoken language an immediate translation of the mental acts 

 concerned in predication. As previously noticed, we meet with precisely the 

 same fact in the natural language of gesture, even after this has been wrought up 

 into the elaborate conceptual systems of the Indians and deaf-mutes. Lastly, in 

 a subsequent chapter we shall see that the same has to be said of all the more 

 primitive forms of spoken language which are still extant among savages. So 

 that here again we meet with additional proof, were any required, of the folly of 

 regarding the copula as an essential ingredient of a proposition. 



