GENERAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REMARKS. 435 



it is manifestly impossible to account for the natural genesis 

 of either. But the whole of this trouble is imaginary. 

 Once discard the plainly illogical inference that because 

 names are necessary to concepts, therefore concepts are 

 necessary to names, and the difficulty is at an end. Now, 

 I have proved, ad nauseam, that there are names and names : 

 names denotative, and names denominative; names rcceptual, 

 as well as names conceptual. Even if we had not had the 

 case of the growing child actually to prove the process — a case 

 which he, in common with all my other opponents, in this con- 

 nexion ignores, — on general grounds alone, and especially 

 from our observations on the lower animals, we might have 

 been practically certain that the faculty of sign-making 

 must have preceded that of thinki7ig the signs. And 

 whether these pre-conceptual signs were made by gesture, 

 grimace, intonation, articulation, or all combined, clearly no 

 difference would arise so far as any question of their 

 influence on psychogenesis is concerned. As a matter of 

 fact, we happen to know that the semiotic artifice of 

 articulating vocal tones for purposes of denotation, dates 

 back so far as to bring us within philologically measur- 

 able distance of the origin of denomination, or conceptual 

 thought — although we have seen good reason to conclude 

 that before that time tone, gesture, and grimace must have 

 been much more extensively employed in sign-making by 

 aboriginal man than they now are by any of the lower 

 animals. So that, upon the whole, unless it can be shown 

 that my distinction between denotation and denomination 

 is untenable — unless, for instance, it can be shown that an 

 infant requires to think of names as such before it can learn 

 to utter them, — then I submit that no shadow of a difficulty 

 lies against the theory of evolution in the domain of philology. 

 While, on the other hand, all the special facts as well as all 

 the general principles hitherto revealed by this science make 

 entirely for the conclusion, that pre-conceptual denotation 

 laid the psychological conditions which were necessary for 

 the subsequent growth of conceptual denomination ; and, 



