236 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



But although I hold this to be the true explanation of the 

 apparent independence of predication and introspection in all 

 cases of highly abstract thought, I am firmly convinced that in 

 all cases where those lower orders of ideation to which I have 

 so often referred as receptual and pre-conceptual are concerned, 

 the independence is not only apparent, but real. This, indeed, 

 I have already proved must be the case with the pre-conceptual 

 propositions of a young child, inasmuch as such propositions 

 are then made in the absence of self-consciousness, or of the 

 necessary condition to their being in any degree introspective. 

 But the point now is, that even in the adult human mind 

 non-conceptual predication is habitual, and that, in cases 

 where only receptual ideation is concerned, predication of this 

 kind need never have been conceptual. For, as Mill very truly 

 says, "it will be admitted that, by asserting the proposition, 

 we wish to communicate information of that physical fact 

 (namely, that the summit of Chimborazo is white), and are 

 not thinking of the names, except as the necessary means of 

 making that communication. The meaning of the proposition, 

 therefore, is that the individual thing denoted by the subject 

 has the attributes connoted by the predicate." * 



Now, if it is thus true that even in ordinary predication we 

 may not require to take conceptual cognizance of the matter 

 predicated — having to do only with the apposition of names 

 immediately suggested by association, — the ideation concerned 

 becomes so closely affiliated with that which is expressed in 

 the lower levels of sign-making, that even if the connecting 

 links were not supplied by the growing child, no one would be 

 justified, on psychological grounds alone, in alleging any 

 difference of kind between one level and another. The object 

 of all sign-making is primarily that of communication, and 

 from our study of the lower animals we know that 

 communication first has to do exclusively with recepts, while 



until they are, as it were, degraded into the pre-conceptual order of ideation. 

 Be it observed, however, that the paragraphs which follow in the text have 

 reference to a totally different principle — namely, that there may be propositions 

 strictly conceptual as to form, which, nevertheless, need never at any time have 

 been conceptual as to thought. 

 * Logic, vol. i., p. 108. 



