THE TRANSITION IN THE INDIVIDUAL, 237 



from our study of the growing- child we know that it is the 

 signs used in the communication of recepts which first lead to 

 the formation of concepts. For concepts are first of all 

 named recepts, known as such ; and we have seen in previous 

 chapters that this kind of knowledge {i.e. of names as names) 

 is rendered possible by introspection, which, in turn is reached 

 by the naming of self as an agent. But even after the power 

 of conceptual introspection has been fully reached, demand is 

 not always made upon it for the communication of merely 

 receptual knowledge ; and therefore it is that not every 

 proposition requires to be introspectively contemplated as 

 such before it can be made. Given the power of denotative 

 nomination on the one hand, and the power of even the 

 lowest degree of connotative nomination on the other, and all 

 the conditions are furnished to the formation of non-con- 

 ceptual statements, which differ from true propositions only 

 in that they do not themselves become objects of thought. 

 And the only difference between such a statement when made 

 by a young child, and the same statement when similarly 

 made by a grown man, is that in the former case it is not even 

 potentially capable of itself becoming an object of thought. 



Here, then, the psychological examination of my oppo- 

 nents' position comes to an end. And, in the result, I claim to 

 have shown that in whatever way we regard the distinctively 

 human faculty of conceptual predication, it is proved to be but 

 a higher development of that faculty of receptual communi- 

 cation, the ascending degrees of which admit of being traced 

 through the brute creation up to the level which they attain 

 in a child during the first part of its second year, — after which 

 they continue to advance uninterruptedly through the still 

 higher receptual life of the child, until by further though not 

 less imperceptible growth they pass into the incipiently con- 

 ceptual life of a human mind — which, nevertheless, is not even 

 then nearly so far removed from the intelligence of the lower 

 animals, as it is from that which in the course of its own 

 subsequent evolution it is eventually destined to become. 



