62 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



to speak of himself as ''I" is because he learns by 

 imitation, and never hears himself called as ''I," but 

 always by some name. Of course he cannot be ex- 

 pected to use the personal pronoun until his intelli- 

 gence has considerably developed. It is not partic- 

 ularly significant that he learns to use pronouns late, 

 although some students of the child mind have made 

 a great point of this fact. Be this as it may, we now 

 find that the progress in the development of lan- 

 guage is rapid and consists in the gradual differen- 

 tiation of broad words into the parts of speech. The 

 method of putting words together to form sentences 

 is, of course, the result of imitation, and, indeed, the 

 whole acquirement of the power of speech is the 

 result of imitation. But it is certainly interesting, 

 in view of what we have noticed of the probable 

 method of the original formation of language, to find 

 that the child universally learns to speak by the same 

 route, namely, sentence words, the formation of sen- 

 tences by the simple approximation of words without 

 real verbs, and finally by the further differentiation 

 of broad words into parts of speech of more definite 

 meaning. 



It is also important to notice in this development 

 of the child that the first words he uses are expres- 

 sive of that class of simple ideas which lie in the 

 region between precepts and concepts. The word 

 **up," for example, has for the child no clear notion. 

 It is not a real concept, but represents one of those 

 intermediate types of ideas which lead from precepts 

 to concepts. With the animal world such ideas never 

 pass beyond this stage, but with the child the 

 crude notions rapidly become more definite. A word 

 which at first stands for the idea of subject, object, 



