MENTAL STATES AND PROCESSES. 107 



conscious personality cannot be led up to in any other 

 way than through the medium of language." But ex- 

 no object of our early thoughts is merely 'the results of our own 

 acts/ but a combined result of our own activity and of the action 

 on us of our environment. Secondly, my observations lead me to 

 believe that the infant's first thoughts relate to things external, and 

 certainly not to the results of its own activity as such, which is a 

 highly complex and developed thought. It may be that the Pro- 

 fessor, when he says, ' The results of our acts become the first object 

 of our conceptual thought,' means that such acts in remote an- 

 tiquity became the objects of man's first thought. This is probably 

 the case, since, with respect to the origin of thought and language. 

 Prof. Max Miiller has adopted Noir^'s crude notion that they sprang 

 from sounds emitted by men at work, conscious of what they 

 were doing, in the presence of others who beheld their actions and 

 heard the sounds ; the result being the formation of. a conceptual 

 word, to attain which five stages had to be gone through as 

 follows : — 



" * (i) Consciousness of our own repeated acts. 

 '' ' (2) Clamor concomitans of these acts. 



" * (3) Consciousness of our clatnor as concomitant to the act. 

 " ' (4) Repetition of that clamor to recall the act. 

 " ' (5) Clamor (root) defined by prefixes, suffixes, etc., to recall 

 the act as localized in its results, its instruments, its agents, etc' 



" But if language and reason are identical, reason could not exist 

 before a single conceptual word existed. Nevertheless, to attain to 

 this first single word, we see, from the above quotation, that man 

 must have had the notion of his own acts as such ; the notion of their 

 repetition ; the notions of clamour, action, and the simultaneity of 

 clamour and action ; the will to recall the act (yet nihil volilum 

 quin prcecognitum) ; and, finally, the notions of consequence, in- 

 strumentality, agency, or whatever further notions the Professor 

 may intend by his ' etc' 



" Thus he who first developed language must be admitted to have 

 already had a mind well stored with intellectual notions ! But can 

 it for one instant be seriously maintained, close as is the connec- 

 tion of language with reason, that their genesis (miracle apart, of 

 which there is no question) was absolutely simultaneous t He 

 must be a bold, not to say a rash, man who would dogmatically 

 affirm this. But if they were not absolutely simultaneous, one must 

 have existed, for however brief a space, before the other. That 



