CONCLUDING REMARKS. 301 



judgments and asserting merit and demerit.* We are 

 strongly persuaded that he will then clearly see that 

 language is the " rubicon of mind," and that it is so 

 simply because it is the index of that intellectual power, 

 the presence of which makes a true and necessary 

 " liniit to evolution," in the ascending series of organic 

 transformations. It is our hope that in the preceding 

 pages we have made it clear that there can be no such 

 things as real signs without intentional meaning, and that 

 unmeant signs are not language : also that there is no 

 meaning without mental conception, and no perception 

 without implicit judgment. Thus, as we have said, the 

 impressions made by the objects of nature on sensitive 

 organisms are different according to the nature of such 

 organisms, each being affected according to its nature 

 and innate powers. In the vital organization of the 

 animal they excite those sensations and more and more 

 complex feelings, imaginations, and emotions which 

 correspond with our own lower mental powers. In the 

 living organism, man, they call forth not only such 

 feelings, but also, by and through them, truly intellectual 

 perceptions spontaneously start forth, containing within 

 them implicitly the very highest abstract ideas, even that 

 of " being." That the prattle of the infant is the out- 

 come of consciousness, and that self-perception and the 

 predication of the copula not only may, but must be 

 present in the rudest forms of language known to us, 

 we have also, we trust, not urged in vain. The ideal 

 portrait of primitive man sketched for us by the author 

 ♦ See Ibid., pp. 243-254, 274, 275, 282-286. 



