384 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



gonist can afford to allege that in any of these cases there is 

 a difference of kind between the mental faculties that are 

 respectively involved ; because his argument on psychological 

 grounds can only stand upon the basis of conceptual cognition, 

 which, in turn, can only stand upon the basis of self-conscious- 

 ness ; and this is demonstrably absent in the child until long 

 after the time when denotative names are connotatively 

 extended by the receptual intelligence of the child itself. 



Thus, there can be no reasonable question that it is 

 psychologically possible for Homo sapiens to have had an 

 ancestry, which — whether already partly human or still simian 

 — was able to carry denotation to a high level of connotation, 

 without the need of cognition belonging to the order concep- 

 tual. Whether the signs were then made by tone and gesture 

 alone, or likewise by articulate sounds, is also, psychologically 

 considered, immaterial. In either case connotation would have 

 followed denotation up to whatever point the higher receptual 

 (" pre-conceptual ") intelligence of such an ancestry was able 

 to take cognizance of simple analogies. And this psycholo- 

 gical possibility becomes on other grounds a probability of the 

 highest order, so soon as we know of any independent evidence 

 touching the corporeal evolution of man from a simian ancestry. 



Now, we have already seen that pre-conceptual connota- 

 tion amounts to what I have termed pre-conceptual judgment. 

 The qualities or relations thus connotated are not indeed 

 contemplated as qualities or as relations ; but in the mere act 

 of such a connotative classification the higher receptual 

 intelligence is virtually judging a resemblance, and virtually 

 predicating its judgment. Therefore I think it probable that 

 the earliest forms of such virtual predication were those 

 which would have been conveyed in single words. And, as 

 we have seen in the foregoing chapters, there is abundant and 

 wholly independent evidence to show, that this form of 

 nascent predication continued to hold an important place 

 until so late in the intellectual history of our race as to leave 

 a permanent record of its occurrence in the structure of all 

 languages now extant. 



