CHAPTER XIV. 



THE WITNESS OF PHILOLOGY. 



We are now in a position to consider certain matters which 

 are of high importance in relation to the subject of the 

 present work. In earlier chapters I have had occasion to 

 show that the whole stress of the psychological distinction 

 between man and brute must be laid — and, in point of fact, 

 has been laid by all competent writers who are against me — 

 on the distinctively human faculty of judgment. Moreover, 

 I have shown that, by universal consent, this faculty is identi- 

 cal with that of predication. Any mind that is able, in the 

 strict psychological signification of the term, to judge, is also 

 able to predicate, and vice versd. I claim, indeed, to have 

 conclusively shown that certain writers have been curiously 

 mistaken in their analysis of predication. These mistakes 

 on their part, however, do not relieve me of the burden of 

 explaining the rise of predication ; and I have sought to 

 discharge the burden by showing how the faculty must have 

 been given in germ so soon as the denotative stage of sign- 

 making passed into the connotative, and thus furnished the 

 condition to bringing into contact, or apposition, the names of 

 objects and the names of qualities or actions. The discussion 

 of this important matter, however, has so far proceeded on 

 grounds of psychological analysis alone. The point has now 

 arrived when we may turn upon the subject the independent 

 light of philological analysis. Whereas we have hitherto 

 considered, on grounds of mental science only, what must have 

 been the genesis of predication — supposing predication to 



