l6o MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



term must evidently have been what I term receptual. For it 

 is impossible to suppose that at that tender age the child was 

 capable of thinking about the term as a term, or of setting the 

 term before the mind as an object of thought, distinct from 

 the object which it served to name. Therefore, w^e can only 

 suppose that the extension of this originally denotative name 

 (whereby it began to be connotative) resembled the case of a 

 similar extension mentioned in the last chapter, where my 

 parrot raised its originally denotative sign for a particular 

 dog to an incipiently connotative value, by applying that sign 

 to all other dogs. That is to say, both in the case of the 

 child and the bird, connotation within these moderate limits 

 was rendered possible by means of receptual ideation alone. 

 But, with advancing age and developing powers, the human 

 mind attains to conceptual ideation ; and it is then in a 

 position to constitute the names which it uses themselves 

 objects of thcy.ght. The consequence is that connotation may 

 then no longer represent the merely spontaneous expression 

 of likeness receptually perceived : it may become the inten- 

 tional expression of likeness conceptually thought out. In 

 the mind of an astronomer the word Star presents a very 

 different mass of connotative meaning from that which it 

 presented to the child, who first extended it from a bright 

 point in the sky to a candle shining in a room. And the 

 reason of this great difference is, that the conceptual thought 

 of the astronomer, besides having greatly added to the conno- 

 tation, has also greatly improved it. The only common 

 quality which the name served to connote when used by the 

 child was that of brightness ; but, although the astronomer is 

 not blind to this point of resemblance between a star and a 

 candle, he disregards it in the presence of fuller knowledge, 

 and will not apply the term even to objects so much more 

 closely resembling a star as a comet or a meteor. Now, this 

 greater accuracy of connotation, quite as much as the greater 

 mass of it, has been reached by the astronomer in virtue of 

 his powers of conceptual thought. It is because he has 

 thought about his names as names that he has thus been able 



