224. THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON. 



when four and a half years old, who when asked to say 

 what room was beneath the drawing-room of her home, 

 "first suggested the bath-room, which was not only 

 above the drawing-room, but also on the opposite side 

 of the house ; next she suggested the dining-room, 

 which, although below the drawing-room, was also on 

 the other side of the house ; and so on, the child clearly 

 having no power to think out so simple a problem," 

 although she herself had wished to know what was 

 under the drawing-room. But this, in our eyes, did not 

 indicate a low level of intellect, but only a certain 

 incapacity for one kind of imagination. Such partial 

 incapacities are by no means rare. There are very good 

 classical scholars who seem unable to form for them- 

 selves the phantasmata they need in order to become 

 good mathematicians, and there are excellent mathe- 

 maticians who have but a very feeble power of retaining 

 those sensuous distinctions which underlie, and are 

 needful for, classical proficiency. 



Mr. Romanes continues,* " There is thus shown to be 

 even less reason to regard the advent of self-conscious- 

 ness as marking a psychological difference of kind, than 

 there would be so to regard the advent of those higher 

 powers of conceptual ideation which subsequently — 

 though so gradually — supervene between early childhood 

 and youth. . . . Or, otherwise stated, the psychological 

 interval between my cebus and my child (when the 

 former successfully investigated the mechanical principle 

 of the screw by means of his highly developed receptual 

 faculties, while the latter unsuccessfully attempted to solve 



