426 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



logical interval) between the generic and the general orders 

 of ideation. 



Again, we saw that in all essential particulars the semiotic 

 construction of this the most primitive mode of articulate 

 communication which has been preserved in the archaeology 

 of spoken language, bears a precise resemblance to that which 

 occurs in the natural language of gesture. As we saw, 

 " gesture-language has no grammar properly so called ; " and 

 we traced in considerable detail the analogies — so singularly 

 numerous and exact — between the forms of sentences as now 

 revealed in gesture and as they first emerged in the early 

 days of speech. In other words, the earliest record that 

 speech is able to yield as to the nature of its own origin, 

 clearly reveals to us this origin as emerging from the yet 

 more primitive language of tone and gesture. For this is the 

 only available explanation of their close family resemblance 

 in the matter of syntax. 



Furthermore, we have seen that in gesture -language, as 

 in the forms of primitive speech now preserved in roots, the 

 purposes of predication are largely furthered by the mere 

 apposition of denotative terms. A generalized term of this 

 kind (which as yet is neither noun, adjective, nor verb), when 

 brought into apposition with another of the same kind, 

 serves to convey an idea of relationship between them, or to 

 state something of the one by means of the other. Yet 

 apposition of this kind need betoken no truly conceptual 

 thought. As we have already seen, the laws of merely 

 sensuous association are sufficient to insure that when the 

 objects, qualities, or events, which the terms severally denote, 

 happen to occur together in Nature, they must be thus 

 brought into corresponding apposition by the mind : it is the 

 logic of events which inevitably guides such pre-conceptual 

 utterance into a statement of the truth that is perceived : the 

 truth is received into the mind, not conceived by it. And it is 

 obvious how repeated statements of truth thus delivered in 

 receptual ideation, lead onwards to conceptual ideation, or to 

 statements of truth as true. 



