268 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON. 



that of the first inventor of the machine. How infinitely 

 less the intelligence of a brute who may happen to use 

 a machine of the kind ! Is the intelligence of a squirrel 

 or white mouse which turns in its wheel-cage greater 

 than that either of the child who purposely gets the 

 wheel-cage to put its pet in, or that of the man who 

 made the cage ? Mr. Romanes must somehow see this, 

 for he says,* *' In order that he should assign names, 

 primitive man must first have had occasion to make his 

 preconceptual statements about the objects, qualities, 

 etc., the names of which afterwards grew out of these 

 statements, or sentence-words." That is to say, he 

 must have been an essentially intellectual person. 



Mr. Romanes next considers | the value of these 

 supposed earlier sentence-words. After stating his 

 hypothesis about the genesis of such early words with 

 the help of gesture — the sound having no meaning apart 

 from the gesture — he says, " From these now well- 

 established facts, [!] we may gain some additional light 

 on . . . the extent to which primitive words were 

 ' abstract ' or ' concrete,' ' particular ' or ' general,' and 

 therefore, 'receptual' or * conceptual.' " Here he cen- 

 sures Prof Max Miiller for proclaiming the truth that 

 language proceeded from the abstract to the concrete, 

 or, as Mr. Romanes phrases it,J that human thought 

 ** sprang into being Minerva-like, already equipped with 

 the divine inheritance of conceptual wisdom." 



He blames § the Professor for adopting, as he says, 

 " the assumption that there can be no order of words 

 which do not, by the mere fact of their existence, 



* p. 332. t p. 334. X p. 335- § p. 336. 



