388 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN 



No\v, this point I consider one of prime importance. For it 

 furnishes us with direct evidence of the fact that, long after 

 mankind had begun to speak, and even long after they had 

 gained considerable proficiency in the art of articulate 

 language, the speakers still continued to refer to themselves 

 in that same kind of objective phraseology as is employed 

 by a child before the dawn of self-consciousness. This, of 

 course, is what on antecedent or theoretical grounds we should 

 infer vmst have been the case ; but it is surely a matter of 

 great moment that our inference on this point should admit 

 of such full and independent verification at the hands of 

 philological research. As we have now so repeatedly seen, 

 the distinction between ideas as receptual and conceptual 

 turns upon the presence or absence of self-consciousness, in 

 the full or introspective signification of that term. And, as 

 we have likewise seen, the outward and visible sign of this 

 inward and spiritual grace is given in the subjective use of 

 pronominal words. But if these things admit of no question 

 in the case of an individual human mind — if in the case 

 of the growing child the rise of self-consciousness is demon- 

 strably the condition to that of conceptual thought, — by 

 what feat of logic can it be possible to insinuate that in 

 the growing psychology of the race there may have been 

 conceptual thought before there was any true self-conscious- 

 ness } Obviously this cannot be insinuated without deny- 

 ing those identical principles of psychology on which my 

 opponents themselves rely. Will it, then, be said that the 

 criterion of self-consciousness which is valid for a child is not 

 valid for the race — that although in the former the rise of 

 self-consciousness is marked by the change from objective 

 to subjective phraseology, in the latter a precisely similar 

 change is not to be accredited with a similar meaning ? If 

 this were to be suggested, it would not merely be quite 

 gratuitous as a suggestion, but directly opposed to the whole 

 of an otherwise perfectly parallel analogy. In point of fact, 

 then, there is obviously no escape from the conclusion that in 

 the race, as in the individual, the development of true, or 



