336 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



furnish as touching the matter which Professor Max MuUer 

 here alludes to in such positive terms. In this connection 

 there can be no possible escape from the tersely expressed 

 conclusion previously quoted from Geiger, and unanimously 

 entertained as an axiom by philologists in general :— " These 

 roots are not the primitive roots : we have perhaps in no one 

 single instance the first aboriginal articulate sound— just as 

 little, of course, the aboriginal signification." * 



But the point which I now wish to bring forward is this. 

 We have previously seen the source of these unfortunate 

 utterances in Professor Max Miiller's philology appears to 

 reside in certain prepossessions which he exhibits in the 

 domain of psychology. For he adopts the assumption that 

 there can be no order of words which do not, by the mere 

 fact of their existence, imply concepts : he does not sufficiently 

 recognize that there may be a power of bestowing names as 

 signs, without the power of thinking these signs as names. 

 Consequently, the distinction which, on grounds of compara- 

 tive psychology, appears to me so obvious and so necessary — 

 i.e. between names as merely denotative marks due to pre- 

 conceptual association, and denominative judgments due to 

 conceptual thought— has escaped his sufficient notice. Con- 

 sequently, also, he has failed to distinguish between ideas 

 as "general" and what I have called "generic;" or between 

 an idea that is general because it is born of an intentional 

 synthesis of the results of a previous analysis, and an idea 

 that is generalized \ because not yet differentiated by any 

 intentional analysis, and therefore representing simply an 

 absence of conceptual thought. My child on first beginning 

 to speak had a generalized idea of similarity between all 

 kinds of brightly shining objects, and therefore called them 



• Ursprung der Sprache, s. 65. For the original German, see the passage as 

 previously quoted on page 273, note. 



t As pointed out in a previous chapter, curious ambiguity attaches to this 

 term. For, as used in biology, it means the hitherto undifferentiated, while in 

 psychology and elsewhere a "generalization" means the synthetically integrated. 

 But, as psychologists never speak of ideas as "generalized," I here use the word in 

 its biological sense. See also above, pp. 277-280. 



