244, JOSEPH JOHN MURPHY 
fails to see its importance. It can scarcely be doubted 
that the higher animals have such generalized ideas of the 
classes of objects surrounding them which are of the most 
importance to their lives ;—that a wolf, for instance, has a 
generalised idea of sheep, and a cat of mice. 
This is a purely spontaneous process; and probably 
animals never get beyond it. The next stage in the 
evolution of thought, and the distinctively human one, 
occurs when, by the self-directed energy of the mind, ac- 
tions are ideally separated from their agents, and qualities 
from their substances. Thus, to the merely animal intelli- 
gence, fire is probably only an object of perception ; but 
the human intelligence forms concepts of the act of burning 
and the quality of brightness; and these concepts demand 
and receive names. ‘The work before us is an account of this 
process. The great service which Prof. Max Miiller in this 
work has done to science, consists in enforcing and illus- 
trating the truth, which, as he points out, was insisted on 
by Locke, ‘‘ that words were never the signs of things, but 
that in their origin they were always the signs of concepts ; 
that language begins where abstraction begins; and that 
the reason why animals have no language is that they do 
not possess the power of abstraction” (p. 295). The entire 
work, in fact, consists of illustrations of this truth from 
the facts of language. 
It is a familiar doctrine this, that the faculty of language 
is the distinctively human power. But the special character 
of man’s mental activity itself requires to be accounted 
for. What is that in the mind of man which makes the 
production of language possible and inevitable? Prof. Max 
Miiller, following Locke, in the passage just quoted, says 
it is the power of abstraction; and no doubt he is right. 
But is this reducible to anything still more elementary? I 
think it is. He makes* the luminous suggestion, without 
appearing fully aware of its importance, that the mental 
actions of animals differ from ours as impulse differs from 
will; and I believe that the root of man’s superiority con- 
sists, not in any heightening of the spontaneous instinctive 
intelligence which he has in common with other animals, but 
in acquiring the power of directing thought at will. 
The root of Consciousness is sensation. The root of Will 
is muscular action. Intelligence has no corresponding root, 
but the first manifestations of Intelligence that we meet in 
* Science of Thought, p. 593. 
