ON THE FACTORS OF EVOLUTION IN LANGUAGE. 243 
without percepts (unless sensation and perception are so 
defined as to make them synonymous) ; there are percepts 
without concepts; and, though it may be that definitely- 
formed concepts are impossible without names for them, yet, 
as I have already remarked, it is a fact of common experience 
that thought often anticipates language, and attains to re- 
sults which we cannot always perfectly express in language. 
Prof. Max Miiller says that he was an evolutionist before 
Darwin, because every student of the formation of language is 
necessarily an evolutionist. ‘This is quite true; yet by refusing 
to study mind in its manifestations in animals, and by studying 
it only in one of its highest manifestations and products, namely 
in the languages of the Aryan race of mankind, he has aban- 
doned the position of an evolutionist, and gone back to one 
resembling that of a physiologist who should insist on study- 
ing the bodily frame of man only, without any light from the 
lower orders of the animal creation. 
By Prof. Max Miiller’s own admission, however, the enume- 
ration of terms in the above series,—NSensations, Percepts, 
Concepts, and Names,—is incomplete. Between Perception, 
which is a power enjoyed, almost certainly, by all animals that 
have the sense of sight, and probably by many that have only 
the sense of touch ; and Conception, which in its full develop- 
ment involves thought and: language; there is an interme- 
diate term in mental development, for which no name has yet 
come into general use. Generalization is the best I can think 
of, but it must be understood that scientific generalization is 
not meant ; only such generalization as can be spontaneously 
effected in the mind of any animal endowed with visual per- 
ception and memory of its perceptions. When many similar 
impressions are made on the sense and leave their traces on 
the memory, similar impressions tend to combine and form a 
generalized image, like Mr. Galton’s composite photographs, 
in which what is common to the several impressions on the 
sense is preserved, while what is special to each is lost or for- 
gotten.* To the formation of such a generalized mental image, 
it is as needful to forget what is unimportant in the visual 
perception as to remember what is important. I suppose 
this must be what Prof. Max Miller means when he saysf 
that ‘ Obliviscence is often more important than Memory.” 
He recognisest the process just described, but, [ think, 
* See Morell’s Psychology (Longman, 1862): a work which is_ less 
known than it deserves. 
+ Science of Thought, p. 20. 
t Ibid., pp. 454, 501. 
