GENERAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REMARKS. 43 1 



In the foregoing rhinn^ of the present instalment of my 

 work I have aimed only at giving an outline sketch of the main 

 features. And even these main features have been so much 

 abbreviated that it is questionable whether more harm than 

 good will not have been done to my argument by so imperfect 

 a summary of it. Nevertheless, as a general result, I think that 

 two things must now have been rendered apparent to every 

 impartial mind. First, that the opponents of evolution have 

 conspicuously failed to discharge their onus probandi^ or to 

 justify the allegation that the human mind constitutes a great 

 and unique exception to the otherwise uniform law of evolution. 

 Second, that not only is this allegation highly improbable 

 a priori, and incapable of proof a posteriori, but that all the 

 evidence that can possibly be held to bear upon the subject 

 makes directly on the side of its disproof. The only semblance 

 of an argument to be adduced in its favour rests upon the 

 distinction between ideation as conceptual and non-conceptual. 

 That such a distinction exists I freely admit ; but that it is 

 a distinction of kind I emphatically deny. For I have shown 

 that the comparatively few writers who still continue to regard 

 it as such, found their arguments on a psychological analysis 

 which is of a demonstrably imperfect character ; that no one 

 of them has ever paid any attention at all to the actual process 

 of psychogenesis as this occurs in a growing child ; and that, 

 with the exception of Professor Max Miiller, the same has to 

 be said with regard to their attitude towards the " witness of 

 philology." Touching the psychogenesis of a child, I have 

 shown that there is unquestionable demonstration of a gradual 

 and uninterrupted passage from the one order of ideation to the 

 other ; that so long as the child's intelligence is moving only 

 in the non-conceptual sphere, it is not distinguishable in any 

 one feature of psychological import from the intelligence of 

 the higher mammalia ; that when it begins to assume the 

 attributes of conceptual ideation, the process depends on the 

 development of true self-consciousness out of the materials 

 supplied by that form of pre-existing or rcceptual self-con- 

 sciousness which the infant shares with the lower animals ; 



