1 86 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



institute this division, I should have to prejudice the question 

 indeed. Either there is some distinction between the naming 

 powers of a parrot and those of a young child, or else there is 

 not. If there is no distinction, so much the better for the 

 purposes of my argument. But I allow that there is a 

 distinction, and I draw it at the first place where it can 

 possibly be said that the intelligence of a child differs in any 

 way at all from that of a parrot — i.e. where the naming 

 powers of a child demonstrably excel those of a parrot, or 

 any other brute. If this place happens to be before the rise 

 of conceptual powers, I am not responsible for the fact ; nor 

 in stating it am I at all disparaging the position of any 

 opponent who takes his stand upon these powers as distinctive 

 of man. If his position were worth anything before, it 

 cannot be affected by my drawing attention to the fact that, 

 while a parrot will extend its denotative name of a dog from 

 a terrier to a setter, it will not follow a child any further in 

 the process of reccptual connotation. 



Or, to put it in another way, when the child says Bozv-wow 

 to a setter, after having learnt this name for a terrier, it is 

 either judging a resemblance and predicating a fact, or else 

 it is doing neither of these things. If my opponents elect to 

 say that the child is doing both these things, there is an end 

 of the only issue between us ; for in that case a parrot also is 

 able both to judge and to predicate. On the other hand, if 

 my opponents adopt the wiser course, and accept my dis- 

 tinction between names as receptual and conceptual, they 

 must also follow me in recognizing the border-land of pre- 

 concepts as lying between the recepts of a bird and the 

 concepts of a man — i.e. the territory which is first occupied 

 by the higher receptual life of a child before this passes into 

 the conceptual life of a man, — for that such a border-land 

 does exist I will prove still more incontestably later on. There 

 is, then, as a matter of observable fact, a territory of ideation 

 which separates the highest recepts of a brute from the lowest 

 concepts of a human being ; and all that my term pre-concep- 

 tion is designed to do is to name this intervening territory. 



