GENERAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REMARKS. 427 



Now, if all this has been the case, it is obvious that 

 aboriginal words can have referred only to matters of 

 purely reccptual significance — i.e. " to those physical acts and 

 qualities which are directly apprehensible by the senses." 

 Accordingly, we find in all the earliest root-words, which the 

 science of philology has unearthed, unquestionable and 

 unquestioned evidence of "fundamental metaphor," or of a 

 conceptual extension of terms which were previously of no 

 more than receptual significance. Indeed, as Professor 

 Whitney says, " so pervading is it, that we never regard our- 

 selves as having read the history of any intellectual or moral 

 term till we have traced it back to its physical origin." 

 Without repeating all that I have so recently said upon this 

 matter, it will be enough once more to insist on the general 

 conclusions to which it led— namely, psychological analysis 

 has already shown us the psychological priority of the recept ; 

 and now philological research most strikingly corroborates 

 this analysis by actually finding the recept in the body of 

 every concept. 



Lastly, I took a brief survey of the languages now spoken 

 by many widely separated races of savages, in order to show 

 the extreme deficiency of conceptual ideation that is thus 

 represented. In the result, we saw that what Archdeacon 

 Farrar calls " the hopeless poverty of the power of abstrac- 

 tion " is so surprising, that the most ardent evolutionist could 

 not well have desired a more significant intermediary between 

 the pre-conceptual intelligence of Homo alalus, and the con- 

 ceptual thought of Homo sapiens. 



Having thus concluded the Philology of our subject, I 

 proceeded, in the last chapter, to consider the probable 

 steps of the transition from receptual to conceptual ideation 

 in the race. 



First I dealt with a view which has been put forward on 

 this matter by certain German philologists, to the effect that 

 speech originated in wholly meaningless sounds, which in the 

 first instance were due to merely physiological conditions. 



