430 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN, 



the sketch which I gave of what this course must have been, 

 it will be enough to say, in the most general terms, that 

 I believe it began with sentence-words in association with 

 gesture-signs ; that these acted and reacted on one another 

 to the higher elaboration of both ; that denotative names, for 

 the most part of onomatopoetic origin, rapidly underwent 

 connotative extensions ; that from being often and necessarily 

 used in apposition, nascent predications arose ; that these 

 gave origin, in later times, to the grammatical distinctions 

 between adjectives and genitive cases on the one hand, and 

 predicative words on the other ; that likewise gesture-signs 

 were largely concerned in the origin of other grammatical 

 forms, especially of pronominal elements, many of which 

 afterwards went to constitute the material out of which the 

 forms of declension and conjugation were developed ; but 

 that although pronouns were thus among the earliest words 

 which were differentiated by mankind as separate parts of 

 speech, it was not until late in the day that any pronouns 

 were used especially indicative of the first person. The sig- 

 nificance of this latter fact was shown to be highly important. 

 I! We have already seen that the whole distinction between 

 man and brute resides in the presence or absence of con- 

 ceptual thought, which, in turn, i^ but an expression of the 

 presence or absence of self-consciousness. Consequently, 

 the whole of this treatise has been concerned with the 

 question whether we have here to do with a distinction of 

 kind or of degree — of origin or of development. In the case 

 of the individual, there can be no doubt that it is a distinction 

 of degree, or development ; and I had previously shown that 

 in this case the phase of development in question is marked 

 by a change of phraseology — a discarding of objective terms 

 for the adoption of subjective when the speaker has occasion 

 to speak of self And now I showed that in the fact here 

 before us we have a precisely analogous proof: in exactly 

 the same way as psychology marks for us " the transition in 

 the individual/' philology marks for us "the transition in 

 the race.'* 



