1 82 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



do this (within the limits that we are now considering), there 

 is no need for any introspective regarding of the name as a 

 name: there is no need to contemplate the widening connota- 

 tion of the name: there is no need to Judge, to define, to 

 denominate. Such classification as is here effected can be 

 effected within the region of reccptual consciousness alone (as 

 we well know from the analogous case of the parrot, and the 

 " practical inferences " of the lower animals generally) ; there- 

 fore, if the denotative name originally assigned to a particular 

 dog admitted of being so assigned as merely the mark of that 

 particular recept, there is no reason to suppose that its subse- 

 quent extension to the more generic recepts afterwards 

 experienced involves any demand upon the conceptual 

 faculty, or implies that the child could only extend this 

 name from a house-dog to a terrier by first performing an act 

 of introspective thought — which, indeed, as we shall see later 

 on, it is demonstrably impossible that a child of this age can 

 be able to do. 



Nevertheless, it is evident that already the child has done 

 more than the parrot. For a parrot will never extend its 

 denotative name of a particular dog to the picture, or even to 

 the image of a dog. The utmost that a parrot will do is to 

 extend the denotative name from one particular dog to 

 another particular dog, which, however, may differ con- 

 siderably from the former as to size, colour, and general 

 appearance. Still, I presume, no one will maintain that thus 

 far there is the faintest evidence of a difference of kind 

 between the connotative faculty of the bird and that of the 

 child. All that these facts can be held to show is that — in 

 the words already quoted from M. Taine while narrating 

 these facts — " analogies which do not strike animals strike 

 men." Or, in my own phraseology, the receptual faculties of 

 a parrot do not go further than the receptual faculties of a 

 very young child : consequently, the denotative name in the 

 case of the parrot only undergoes the first step in the process 

 of receptual extension — namely, from a house-dog to a terrier, 

 a setter, a mastiff, a Newfoundland, &c. But in the case of 



