GENERAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REMARKS. 425 



therefore, t^at any attempt to draw between one and another 

 of them a distinction of kind has been shown to be impossible. 



The conckisions thus reached at the close of Chapter XIV. 

 with regard to the philology of predication were greatly 

 strengthened by additional facts which were immediately 

 adduced in the next Chapter with regard to the philology of 

 conception. Here the object was to throw the independent 

 light of philology upon a point which had already been 

 considered as a matter of psychology, namely, the passage of 

 receptual denotation into conceptual denomination. This is 

 a point which had previously been considered only with 

 reference to the individual : it had now to be considered with 

 reference to the race. 



First it was shown that, owing to the young child being 

 surrounded by an already constructed grammar of predicative 

 forms, the earlier phases in the evolution of speech are greatly 

 foreshortened in the ontogeny of mankind, as compared with 

 what the study of language shows them to have been in the 

 phylogeny. Gesture-signs are rapidly starved out when a 

 child of to-day first begins to speak, and so to learn the use 

 of grammatical forms. But early man was under the necessity 

 of elaborating his grammar out of his gesture-signs — and this 

 at the same time as he was also coining his sentence-words. 

 Therefore, while the acquisition of names and forms of speech 

 by infantile man must have depended in chief part upon 

 gestures and grimace, this acquisition by the infantile child is 

 actively inimical to both. 



Next we saw that the philological doctrine of " sentence- 

 words" threw considerable additional light on my psycho- 

 logical distinction between ideas as general and generic. 

 For a sentence-word is the expression of an idea hitherto 

 generalized, that is to say undifferentiated. Such an idea, as 

 we now know, stands at the antipodes of thought from one 

 which is due to what is called a generalization — that is to say, 

 a conceptual synthesis of the results of a previous analysis. 

 And the doctrine of sentence-words recognizes an immense 

 historical interval (corresponding with the immense psycho- 



