312 ON LIFE AND ORGANISATION. 



consciousness, individual and objective acts — that is to say, they 

 are induced by the presence of an object or exciting cause, and are 

 connected in the most direct manner by the instinctive laws of its 

 constitution. The memory and the imagination (which is dependent 

 on the memory) of the brute may be compared to those systems of 

 Mnemonics which are resorted to by persons who have not acquired 

 the faculty of grouping under general principles the facts which 

 they desire to remember. 



The apparent intellectual processes of the brute are, bike its 

 acts of memory and imagination (Mnemonic and Phantasmic acts), 

 merely individual acts of objective consciousness, connected by 

 the necessary elementary psychical consecution. A recollection 

 or a phantasm immediately follows an objective excitement ; 

 and an apparent intellectual conclusion is only a single, neces- 

 sary, and terminal movement in advance of the primary psychical 

 impression. 



If we assume, indeed, the absence of self-consciousness in the 

 brute, we must admit the corresponding absence of intellectual 

 movement. The simplest intellectual process involves at least 

 three steps — the formation of a general notiori or concept, the 

 predication of the subject of the process in the concept, and the 

 necessary conclusion. But a concept is an abstraction, a mere 

 subjective form under which we group together any number of 

 objects by the points in which they agree. It requires, therefore, 

 for its attainment a self-conscious power. In like manner the 

 predicating anything of an object, or of the subject of a thought, 

 and the consequent conclusion, involve acts of self-consciousness. 

 Every so-called act of thought, or intellectual process in the brute, 

 must therefore, if we assume the absence of self-consciousness, be 

 reduced to the level of an act of suggestion. 



In the want of self-consciousness, and irrespective of the more 

 or less non-adaptation of the appropriate organ, we have an 

 explanation of the absence of speech even in the highest form of 

 the brute. Language is an organon developed in exact harmony 

 with, and presenting a complete counterpart to, all the arts, move- 

 ments, and processes of thought. Words, relative terms, and 

 propositions, are merely the forms in winch language represents 

 the corresponding intellectual movements. The various signs and 



