REASON AND DIVERS TONGUES. 271 



contest. It shows how perfectly logical gesture-language 

 may be, and therefore, we may infer, always was as 

 soon as it existed at all. 



He then endeavours to show that language was at 

 first essentially sensuous (what he calls receptual), and 

 not intellectual. Here we must distinguish : As we 

 have said again and again, being rational animals, we 

 must use bodily signs to denote our thoughts, and 

 require to have- our conceptions first aroused by the 

 incidence of sense-impressions in groups and groups of 

 groups. Every highest conception of ours depends on 

 the recognition of preceding acts of conception, and 

 these on the imagination of the sense- impressions which 

 called them forth. Thus there is, and must be, a 

 sensuous element accompanying every concept.* But 

 this sensuous element is not the concept itself, since 

 it exists beside, or rather, underlies the concept. Our 

 earliest perceptions, though, of course, truly conceptual, 

 contain concepts of a lowly order, called forth by 

 sense cognitions. Nevertheless, the very highest uni- 

 versal, even that of " being," are latent in every one 

 of them. Now, Mr. Romanes, believing as he does 

 that the lower concepts are but sense cognitions with 

 names to them, naturally declares \ that the evolu- 

 tionist would clearly "expect to find more or less 

 well-marked traces, in the fundamental constitution of 

 all languages, of what has been called ' fundamental 

 metaphor ' — by which is meant an intellectual extension 

 of terms that originally were of no more than sensuous 

 signification. And this," he adds, " is precisely what we 

 * See " On Truth," p. 88. f P- 343- 



