434 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



authority, that " conceptual thought {Begriff) allows itself to 

 be traced backwards into an ever narrowing circle, and 

 inevitably tends to a point where there is no longer either 

 thought or speech." * But if these things cannot be denied 

 by Max Miiller himself, I am at a loss to understand why 

 he should part company with other philologists with regard 

 to the origin of conceptual terms. With them he asserts 

 that there can be no concepts without words (spoken or 

 otherwise), and with them he maintains that when the 

 meanings of words are traced back as far as philology can 

 trace them, they obviously tend to the vanishing point of 

 which Geiger speaks. Yet, merely on the ground that this 

 vanishing point can never be actually reached by the 

 investigations of philology — i.e., that words cannot record 

 the history of their own birth, — he stands out for an 

 interruption of the principle of continuity at the place where 

 words originate. A position so unsatisfactory I can only 

 explain by supposing that he has unconsciously fallen into 

 the fallacy of concluding that because all A is B, therefore 

 all B is A. Finding that there can be no concepts without 

 names, he concludes that there can be no names without 

 concepts.! And on the basis of such a conclusion he 

 naturally finds it impossible to explain how either names or 

 concepts could have had priority in time : both, it seems, must 

 have been of contemporaneous origin ; and, if this were so, 



♦ Ursprung der Sprache, s. 119. 



t It would be no answer to say that by '* names " he means only signs of ideas 

 which present a conceptual value— or, in other words, that he would refuse to 

 recognize as a name what I have called a denotative sign. For the question here 

 is not one of terminology, but of psychology. I care not by what terms we 

 designate these different sorts of signs ; the question is whether or not they differ 

 from one another in kind. If the term " name " is expressly reserved for signs of 

 conceptual origin, it would be no argument, upon the basis of this definition, to 

 say that there cannot be names without concepts ; for, in terms of the defini- 

 tion, this would merely be to enunciate a truism : it would be merely to say that 

 without concepts there can be no concepts, nor, a fortiori, the signs of them. In 

 short, the issue is by no means one as to a definition of terms ; it is the plain 

 question whether or not a non-conceptual sign is the precursor of a conceptual 

 one. And this is the question which I cannot find that Max Miiller has adequately 

 faced. 



