THE TRANSITION IN THE INDIVIDUAL, 21 5 



sufficient for the purpose of conducting what Mr. Mivart 

 calls a "practical inference," and so of enabling her to know 

 that a man still remained behind, they were clearly not 

 enough to enable her to know the numerical relations as 

 relations, or in any way to predicate to herself, 3 — 2= i. In 

 order to do this, the bird would have required to quit the 

 region of receptual knowledge, and rise to that of conceptual: 

 she would have required in some form or another to have 

 substituted symbols for ideas. It makes no difference, so far 

 as this distinction is concerned, when we learn that in dealing 

 with certain savages " each sheep must be paid for 

 separately : thus, suppose two sticks of tobacco to be the 

 rate of exchange for one sheep, it would sorely puzzle a 

 Dammara to take two sheep and give him two sticks." * All 

 that such facts show is that in some respects the hin-her 

 receptual life of brutes attains almost as high a level of 

 ideation as the lower conceptual life of man ; and although 

 this fact no doubt greatly lessens the difficulty which my 

 opponents allege as attaching to the supposition that the two 

 were genetically continuous, it does not in itself dispose of the 

 psychological distinction between a recept and a concept. 



This distinction, as we have now so often seen, consists 

 in a recept being an idea which is not itself an object of 

 knowledge, whereas a concept, in virtue of having been 

 named by a self-conscious agent, is an idea which stands 

 before the mind of that agent as an idea, or as a state of 

 mind which admits of being introspectively contemplated as 



* Galton, Tropical South Africa, p. 213. The author adds, "Once, while I 

 watched a Dammara floundering hojidessly in a calculation on one side of me 

 I observed Dinah, my spaniel, equally embarrassed on the other. She was over- 

 looking half a dozen of her new-born puppies, which had been removed two or 

 three times from her, and her anxiety was excessive, as she tried to find out if 

 they were all present, or if any were still missing. She kept puzzling and running 

 her eyes over them, backwards and forwards, but could not satisfy herself. She 

 evidently had a vague notion of counting, but the figure was too large for her 

 I. rain. Taking the two as they stood, dog and Dammara, the comparison 

 reflected no great honour on the man." As previously stated, I taught the 

 chimpanzee "Sally" to give one, two, three, four, or five straws at word of 

 command. 



15 



