REASON AND PRIMITIVE MAN, 285 



us, since we have already observed, here and else- 

 where,* and Mr. Romanes himself has declared, that 

 animals make practical signs of the kind, though not 

 articulate ones, and the presence of such mere practical 

 means to a practical end, gives no clue to the intro- 

 duction of a " soul of meaning " into them. Mr. Darwin 

 is quoted as asking, " May not some unusually wise ape- 

 like animal have imitated the growl of a beast of prey, 

 and thus told his fellow-monkeys the nature of the 

 expected danger ? " and Prof. Whitney as saying of some 

 hypothetical pithecoid men, "There is no difficulty in 

 supposing them to have possessed forms of speech, more 

 rudimentary and imperfect than ours." We say again, 

 of course not ; there is no difficulty in supposing 

 anything we want to suppose ; but no intensity or 

 reiteration of idle " suppositions " will afford a fragment 

 of evidence in support of what is so " supposed." It is 

 always the same kind of fallacy which besets these 

 speculators : sensitive phenomena are supposed to be 

 divided and subdivided till they are imagined to be 

 subdivided enough for the entrance of a grain of 

 conceptual power into them. Such a grain having once 

 been smuggled in unnoticed, there is then really no 

 difficulty in seeing how it may augment till it attains 

 the level of the intellect of a Scotus. But phenomena 

 are not really to be explained by merely being sub- 

 divided or even pulverized. Of course Mr. Romanes him- 

 self thus slips in intellect, without saying so, although 

 not with any personal disingenuousness, but with an 

 entirely innocent unconsciousness of what he is doing. 

 * See " On Truth," p. 352. 



