REASON AND LANGUAGE. 175 



" The distinction resides in the intellectual powers ; not 

 in the symbols thereof. So that a man means* it 

 matters not by what signs he expresses his meaning : 

 the distinction between him and the brute consists in his 

 being able to mean a proposition!' that is, " to make an 

 act of judgment." 



Mr. Romanes unintentionally misrepresents, and 

 quite needlessly censures us for having saidf that the 

 simplest element of thought is a judgment. He evi- 

 dently thinks we meant an explicit, instead of an implicit, 

 judgment. Yet as an "explicit" judgment is manifestly 

 made up of concepts, it is strange that he should have 

 deemed us capable of an absurdity at once so out- 

 rageous and so evident. That the simplest element of 

 thought is an implicit judgment, Mr. Romanes himself 

 states X plainly enough. 



* See also "On Truth," p. 280. It is curious that Mr. 

 Romanes criticizes Prof. Huxley's exceedingly sophistical remark 

 about a machine which marks likeness and unlikeness, saying 

 ("Critiques and Addresses," p. 281), "Whatever does this rea- 

 sons ; and if a machine produces the effects of reason, I see no 

 more ground for denying it the reasoning power, because it is 

 unconscious, than I see for refusing Mr. Babbage's engine the title 

 of a calculating machine on the same grounds." This remark Mr. 

 Romanes declares absurd, but he excuses the Professor on the 

 ground that " he must have been writing in some ironical sense, 

 and therefore purposely threw his criticisms into a preposterous 

 form." It was, however, by no means ironical, but a very serious 

 work, which first appeared in the Contemporary Review, 1871, as a 

 criticism of our " Genesis of Species," and an article in the 

 Quarterly Review, on Darwin's " Descent of Man." 



t In an address to the Biological Section of the British Associa- 

 tion, in 1879. 



X Thus at p. 168 he says, " Given the power of conceiving, and 

 the germ of judgment is implied, though not expanded into the 

 blossom of formal predication. For whenever we bestow a name 



