2 26 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



and the fully developed powers of human thought contrasted 

 with their low beginnings in the brute creation, without any 

 attention having been paid to the probable history of their 

 development. Hitherto, so far as I can find, no psychologist 

 has presented clearly the simple question whether the faculty 

 of naming is always and necessarily co-extensive with that 

 of tkhikijig the names ; and, therefore, the two faculties have 

 been assumed to be one and the same. Yet, as I have 

 shown in an earlier chapter, even in the highest forms of 

 human ideation we habitually use names without waiting to 

 think of them as names — which proves that even in the 

 highest regions of ideation the two faculties are not necessarily 

 coincident.* And here I have further shown that, whether 

 we look to the brute or to the human being, we alike find that 

 the one faculty is in its inception wholly independent of the 

 other — that there are connotative names before there are any 

 denominative thoughts, and that these connotative names, when 

 they first occur in brute or child, betoken no further aptitude 

 of ideation than is betokened by those stages in the language 

 of gesture which they everywhere overlap. The named recepts 

 of a parrot cannot be held by my opponents to be true con- 

 cepts, any more than the indicative gestures of an infant can 

 be held by them to differ in kind from those of a dog. 



I submit, then, that neither as regards the indicative, the 

 denotative, nor the connotative stages of sign-making is it 

 argumentatively possible to allege any difference of kind 

 between animal and human intelligence — apart, I mean, from 

 any evidence of self-consciousness in the latter, or so long as 

 the intelligence of either is moving in what I have called the 

 receptual sphere. Let us, then, next consider what I have 

 called the pre-conceptual stage of ideation, or that higher 



* See pp. 81-83, where it is shown that even in cases where conceptual 

 thought is necessar)' for the original formation of a name, the name may afterwards 

 be used without the agency of such thought — ^just in the same way as actions 

 originally due to intelligence may, by frequent repetition, become automatic. At 

 the close of the present chapter it will be shown that the same is true even of full 

 or formal predication. 



