4o8 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN, 



self-consciousness, is able to make known its wants, and 

 otherwise to communicate its ideas, by way of pre-conceptual 

 predication. I gave many instances of this pre-conceptual 

 predication, which abundantly proved that the pre-concep- 

 tual self-consciousness of which it is the expression amounts 

 to nothing more than a practical recognition of self as an 

 active and feeling agent, without any introspective recognition 

 of that self as an object of knowledge. 



Given, then, this stage of mental evolution, and what 

 follows 1 The child, like the animal, is supplied by its logic 

 of recepts with a world of images, standing as signs of 

 outward objects ; with an ejective knowledge of other minds, 

 and with that kind of recognition of self as an active, 

 suffering, and accountable agent to which allusion has just 

 been made. But, over and above the animal, the child has 

 now at its command a much more improved machinery of 

 sign-making, which, as we have before seen, is due to the 

 higher evolution of its receptual ideation. Now among the 

 contents of this ideation is a better apprehension of the mental 

 states of other human beings, together with a greatly increased 

 power of denotative utterance, whereby the child is able to 

 name receptually such ejective states as it thus receptually 

 apprehends. These, therefore, severally receive their appro- 

 priate denotations, and so gain clearness and precision as 

 ejective images of the corresponding states experienced by 

 the child itself. "Mamma pleased to Dodo" would have no 

 meaning as spoken by a child, unless the child knew from his 

 own feelings what is the state of mind which he thus ejectively 

 attributes to his mother. Hence, we find that at the same 

 age the child will also say " Dodo pleased to mamma." 

 Now it is evident that we are here approaching the very 

 borders of true or conceptual self-consciousness. The child, 

 no doubt, is still speaking of himself in objective phraseology ; 

 but he has advanced so far in the interpretation of his own 

 states of mind as clearly to name them, in the same way as 

 he would name any external objects of sense-perception. 

 Thus is he enabled to fix these states before his mental vision 



