42 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



Auguste Comte, that besides the logic of signs, there is a 

 logic of images, and a logic of feelings. In many of the 

 familiar processes of thought, and especially in uncultured 

 minds, a visual image serves instead of a word. Our visual 

 sensations, perhaps only because they are almost always 

 present along with the impressions of our other senses, have a 

 facility of becoming associated with them. Hence, the charac- 

 teristic visual appearance of an object easily gathers round it, 

 by association, the ideas of all other peculiarities which have, 

 in frequent experience, co-existed with that appearance ; and, 

 summoning up these with a strength and certainty far sur- 

 passing that of merely casual associations which it may also 

 raise, it concentrates the attention on them. This is an image 

 serving for a sign — the logic of images. The same function 

 may be fulfilled by a feeling. Any strong and highly interest- 

 ing feeling, connected with one attribute of a group, spontane- 

 ously classifies all objects according as they possess, or do not 

 possess, that attribute. We may be tolerably certain that the 

 things capable of satisfying hunger form a perfectly distinct 

 class in the mind of any of the more intelligent animals ; 

 quite as much as if they were able to use or understand the 

 word food. We here see in a strong light the important truth 

 that hardly anything universal can be afifirmed in psychology 

 except the laws of association." * 



Furthermore, Mansel tersely conveys the truth which I am 

 endeavouring to present, thus : — " The mind recognizes the 

 impression which a tree makes on the retina of the eye : this is 

 presentative consciousness. It then depicts it. From many 

 such pictures it forms a general notion, and to that notion it 

 at last appropriates a name." ■\ Almost in identical language 



* Examination of Hamilton'' s Philosophy, p. 403. 



t To this, Max Mliller objects on account of its veiled conceptualism — seeing 

 that it represents the "notion" as chronologically prior to the *'name" {Science 

 of 7ho2ight, p. 268). With this criticism, however, I am not concerned. Whether 

 "the many pictures" which the mind thus forms, and blends together into what 

 Locke terms a "compound idea," deserve, when so blended, to be called "a 

 general notion " or a "concept" — this is a question of terminology of which I 

 steer clear, by assigning to such compound ideas the term recepts, and reserving 

 the terra notions, or concepts, for compound ideas after they have been named. 



