262 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON. 



distinction they assert. They can thus maintain as 

 firmly as ever that intellectual language is " the Rubicon 

 of Mind." Between the mere language of feeling and 

 the sensuous cognition of brutes, on the one hand, and 

 intellectual language and perception on the other, there 

 remains an essential distinction of kind — that is, of 

 origin. Whether we look to the psychogenesis of the 

 individual or to that of the race, we alike see the full 

 force of the distinction, and recognize, in harmony there- 

 with, the entire absence of any evidence of transition 

 from the emotional sign-making power of the brute to 

 the faculty of conceptual expression possessed by man. 



Mr. Romanes passes next * (in Chapter XV.) to a 

 consideration of what he calls " the passage of receptual 

 denotation into conceptual denomination, as this is 

 shown to have occurred in the prehistoric evolution of 

 the race." He means by this, the origin of words 

 expressing concepts. He every now and again makes 

 use of assertions which much too strongly affirm as true 

 that of which he has got to prove the truth. Thus he 

 speaks t of " what is undoubtedly the earliest phase of 

 articulate sign-making," as if he had witnessed primitive 

 man at work, and this though (to show how uncertain 

 even less disputable matters may be) he has himself 

 told us { that while some authorities consider polysyn- 

 thesis to be a survival of what was once the universal 

 form of languages, yet, " on the other hand, it is with 

 equal certainity affirmed that * polysynthesis ' is not a 

 primitive feature, but an expansion of agglutination." 

 Again, speaking § of the child's '' ultimate germ of 



* p 326. t p. 327- X P- 255- § p. 327- 



