no THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON. 



Martha Obrecht. He also says, " It is only by means 

 of marking ideas by names that the faculty of conceptual 



* This is an orange,' I must implicitly think and say, * This is 

 round, and yellow, has a peculiar skin, a sweet juice, etc. ; there- 

 fore it is an orange.' The ' therefore ' represents, in fact, the 

 justification of our act of addition. We have by slow and repeated 

 addition formed the concept-name, * orange,' and by saying, ' This is 

 an orange,' we say no more than that we feel justified, till the 

 contrary is proved, in adding this object before us to the sum of 

 oranges already known to us. If the contrary is proved, we sub- 

 tract, and we add our present object either to the class and name 

 of lemons, citrons, etc., or to a more general class, such as apples, 

 fruit, round objects, etc. We ought really to distinguish, as I have 

 tried to show, not only two, but four phases in every act of cogni- 

 tion, viz. sensation, perception, conception, and naming ; and I 

 contend that these four phases, though distinguishable, are not 

 separable, and that no act of cognition is perfect without the last 

 phase of naming. 



" But how is it. Prof Mivart continues, that different words in 

 our language have one meaning, and different meanings one word 1 

 Does not this show that thought and language cannot be identical? 



" It has been the principal object of all my mythological studies 

 to account not only for the origin of polyonymy and homonymy^ 

 but to discover in them the cause of much that has to be called 

 mythology, whether in ancient tradition, religion, philosophy, or 

 even in modern science. I must therefore refer Prof. Mivart to 

 my earlier writings, and can only mention here a few well-known 

 cases of mythology arising from polyonymy and homonymy. 



" We can easily understand why people should have called the 

 planet Venus both the morning and the evening star ; but we 

 know that in consequence of these two names many people have 

 believed in two stars instead of one. The same mountain in 

 Switzerland is called by the people on the south side Blackhorn^ 

 by the people on the north side Whitehorn, and many a traveller 

 has been misled when asking his way to the one or the other. 

 Because in German there are two words, Verstand and Vernunft^ 

 originally meaning exactly the same thing, German metaphysicians 

 have changed them into two distinct faculties, and English philo- 

 sophers have tried to introduce the same distinction between the 

 understanding as the lower and reason as the higher faculty. 



" Nothing is really easier to understand, if only we consult the 



