MENTAL STATES AND PROCESSES. 117 



of without words, "concepts become, as it were, de- 

 graded into recepts, but recepts of a degree of com- 

 plexity of organization which would not have been 

 possible but for their conceptional parentage." Now, 

 it is quite true that thoughts, as well as words, are very 

 often made use of without our adverting to the full 

 meaning we give them (and, indeed, the full implications 

 of our thoughts are hardly ever noted), so that they 

 are used as intellectual counters or symbols in reason- 

 ing. * Nevertheless, we are always conscious of what 

 they are, and can direct our attention at will to their 

 full intellectual significance. Thus they are widely 

 different from " recepts," and never become (what they 

 never originally were) a mere bundle of feelings. We 

 therefore deny in the strongest terms that a concept 

 can ever be degraded into a recept 



Mr. Romanes once more very surprisingly declares \ 



maintain is that thought cannot exist without signs, and that our 

 most important signs are words." Of course this is true, and this 

 is what we have always maintained. But if it is true, then thought 

 can exist without words. The Professor quotes from p. 58 of a 

 work pubhshed by Longmans, entitled, " Three Introductory Lectures 

 on the Science of Thought, delivered at the Royal Institution, 

 London." At p. 405 of the Nineteenth Century he asks, "What 

 else can the elements of thought be, if not words, the embodiment 

 of concepts ? " But if " words " are " the embodiment of concepts," 

 the concepts must exist before they are embodied. The " elements 

 of thought," then, must be something else than words. The 

 Professor cannot mean that people by merely uttering unmeaning 

 articulate sounds, get thought into them. 



* Our power of thus temporarily disregarding the significance 

 of concepts is a great help to us in our intellectual progress, as an 

 economy of labour. As to this, see " On Truth," p. 363. 



t pp. 83, 397. This is almost enough to make an opponent 

 despair of enabling him to understand his (the said opponent's) 

 position. 



