414 



MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN 



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-conceptual statements, which differ from true propo- 

 sitions 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. 



The investigation having been thus concluded so far 

 as comparative psychology was concerned, I next turned 

 upon the subject the independent light of comparative 

 philology. Whereas we had hitherto been dealing with 

 what on grounds of psychological analysis alone we might 

 fairly infer were the leading phases in the development of 

 distinctively human ideation, we now turned to that large 

 mass of direct evidence which is furnished by the record of 

 Language, and is on all hands conceded to render a kind 

 of unintentional record of the pre-historic progress of this 

 ideation. 



The first great achievement of comparative philology has 

 been that of demonstrating, beyond all possibility of question, 

 that language as it now exists did not appear ready-made, 

 or by way of any specially created intuition. Comparative 

 philology has furnished a completed proof of the fact that 

 language, as we now know it, has been the result of a 

 gradual evolution. In the chapter on "Comparative 



