3'4 



NATURE 



IJan, 31, 1889 



ceptual, act. Natural or conventional signs may thus be 

 built, by the animal, into the structure of its percepts or 

 recepts. They cannot be consciously given for the pur- 

 poses of conceptual thought. Mr. Romanes, at this stage 

 of his inquiry, e.xtends his classification, marking off four 

 stages of ideation. 



(i) Loiver recepts, comprising the mental life of all the 

 lower animals, and so including such powers of receptual 

 connotation as a child when first emerging from infancy 

 shares with a parrot. 



(2) Higher recepts, ox pre-concepts, comprising all the 

 extensive tract of ideation that belongs to a child be- 

 tween the time when its powers of receptual connotation 

 first surpass those of a parrot up to the age at which 

 connotation as merely connotative begins to become 

 denominative. 



(3) Lower concepts, comprising the province of conceptual 

 ideation when this first emerges from the higher receptual, 

 up to the point where denominative connotation has to do, 

 not merely with the naming of recepts, but also with that 

 of associated concepts. 



(4) Higher concepts, comprising all the further excel- 

 Lencies of human thought. 



With this apparatus of terms, Mr. Romanes is prepared 

 to enter upon the question of self-consciousness, which, 

 he says, consists in paying that same kind of attention to 

 internal or psychical processes as is habitually paid to 

 external or physical processes, or in bringing to bear upon 

 subjective phenomena the same powers of perception {sic) 

 as are brought to bear upon the objective. I question 

 whether Mr. Romanes's opponents will be quite satisfied 

 with this definition. Starting with it, however, Mr. 

 Romanes contends that, "given the protoplasm of the 

 sign-making faculty so far organized as to have reached 

 the denotative stage ; and given also the protoplasm of 

 judgment so far organized as to have reached the stage 

 of stating a truth without the mind being yet sufficiently 

 developed to be conscious of itself as an object of thought, 

 and therefore not able to state to itself a truth as true ; by 

 a confluence of these two protoplasmic elements an act 

 of fertilization is performed, such that the subsequent pro- 

 cesses of mental organization proceed apace, and soon 

 reach the stage of differentiation between subject and 

 object." In working out this contention he makes use of 

 the fact that a large number of the recepts of the brute 

 have reference, not to objects of sense, or even to muscular 

 sensations, but to the mental states of other animals. 

 We wish he had given us more information on this head — 

 not as to the fact, which can hardly be questioned, but as 

 to the mode of origin of this ejective element, and as to 

 how far such an element modifies the perceptual or receptual 

 iiature of the mental product or synthesis into which it 

 enters. The ejective element is so purely inferential, and 

 woyld seem to be reached by so indirect a process through 

 the mental states of the animal itself, that further informa- 

 tion on Mr. Romanes's view of the matter would have 

 been welcome, Proceeding, however, from this basis, he 

 takes it to be a matter of general observation that animals 

 habitually and accurately interpret the mental states of 

 other animals, while they well know that other animals 

 are similarly able to interpret theirs— as is best proved 

 by their practising the arts of cunning, concealment, 

 hypocrisy, &c. Thus the truth is "gradually borne in 



upon the mind of an animal that it is a separate 

 individuality ; and this, though it is conceded that the 

 animil is never able, even in the most shadowy manner, 

 to think about itself as such. In this way there arises a 

 sort of ' outward self-consciousness,' which differs from 

 true or inward self-consciousness only in the absence of 

 any attention being directed upon the inward mental 

 states as such." Turning then from the animal to the 

 child, Mr. Romanes contends that at an early age he only 

 possesses outward or receptual self-consciousness. As 

 yet he has paid no attention to his own mental states 

 further than to feel that he feels them : he speaks to and 

 of himself in the third person or by his proper name. 

 " The change of a child's phraseology from speaking of 

 self as an object to speaking of self as a subject does not 

 take place — or but rarely so — till the third year. When 

 it has taken place, we have definite evidence of true 

 self-consciousness, though still in a rudimentary stage." 

 These in brief— and itis difficult to copdense the argument 

 into a small compass— are the steps by which Mr. Romanes 

 ascends to rudimentary self-consciousness as it first dawns 

 upon the child-mind. I find myself unable either to accept 

 or to criticize Mr. Romanes's account of the genesis of 

 self-consciousness. I have read and re-read it, but find 

 myself incapable of thinking myself into the gradually 

 ascending stages. I fail adequately to imagine the 

 mental condition of the dog or the very young child in 

 which outward or receptual, and eventually inward or 

 conceptual, self-consciousness is being evolved. I believe 

 with Mr. Romanes that the evolution has taken place ; 

 but I fail to realize the how. This is, of course, not his 

 fault : he gives me the steps of the process ; he cannot 

 give me the capacity to conceive them. In any case, Mr. 

 Romanes claims to have shown — and how far the claim 

 is justifiable the reader must determine for himself — 

 " that, in whatever way we regard the distinctively human 

 faculty of conceptual predication, it is proved to be but a 

 higher development of that faculty of receptual communi- 

 cation, the ascending degrees of which admit of being 

 traced through the brute creation up to the level which 

 they attain in a child during the first part of its second 

 year, — after which they continue to advance uninterruptedly 

 through the still higher receptual life of the child, until, by 

 further though not less imperceptible growth, they pass into 

 the incipiently conceptual life of the human mind." 



I have left myself no space to deal with the purely 

 philological part of the work. I may note, however, that, 

 in speaking of the roots into which language may be 

 analyzed, Mr. Romanes contends that they can only be 

 regarded as original or primary in the sense that they are 

 the ultimate results of analysis, i.e. that they are not 

 original in the sense of representing the ideation of really 

 primitive man ; and, again, that they for the most part 

 stand for named recepts or lower concepts, and in a 

 comparatively small degree for higher concepts or th'e 

 results of conceptual analysis. In both these contentions 

 I conceive he is right. Speaking as a layman of the work 

 of one who freely admits that he is not an expert, the 

 philological analysis seems to me extremely well done. 



In conclusion, I would congratulate Mr. Romanes on 

 this his latest volume, which undoubtedly contains much 

 excellent and painstaking work. If I am not altogether 

 satisfied with his psychology; if J am unable to agree 



