REASONING. 327 



thought. Immediate inferences woukl be a good name for 

 these simple acts of reasoning requiring but two terms,* 

 were it not that formal logic has already appropriated the 

 expression for a more technical use. 



'RECEPTS.' 



In these first and simplest inferences the conclusion 

 may follow so continuously upon the * sign ' that the latter 

 is not discriminated or attended to as a separate object by the 

 mind. Even now we can seldom define the optical signs 

 which lead us to infer the shapes and distances of the ob- 

 jects which by their aid we so unhesitatingly perceive. 

 The objects, too, when thus inferred, are general objects. 

 The dog crossing a scent thinks of a deer in general, or of 

 another dog in general, not of a particular deer or dog. To 

 these most primitive abstract objects Dr. G. J. Eomanes 

 gives the name of recepts or generic ideas, to distinguish 

 them from concepts and general ideas properly so called. f 

 They are not analyzed or defined, but only imagined. 



" It requires but a slight analysis of our ordinary mental processes 

 to prove that all our simpler ideas are group-arrangements which have 

 been formed spontaneously or without any of that intentionally com- 

 paring, sifting, and combining process whicli is required in the higher 

 departments of ideational activity. The comparing, sifting, and com- 

 bining is here done, as it were, for the conscous agent, not hy him. 

 Recepts are received ; it is only concepts that require to be conceived, 

 ... If I am crossing a street and hear behind me a sudden shout, I 

 do not require to wait in order to predicate to myself that there is prob- 

 ably a hansom-cab just about to run me down : a cry of this kind, and 

 in those circumstances, is so intimately associated in my mind with its 



* I see no need of assuming more than two terms lu this sort of reason- 

 ing — first, the sign, and second, the thing inferred from it. Either may 

 be complex, but essentially it is but A calling up B, and no middle term is 

 involved. M. Binet, in his most intelligent little book. La Psychologic du 

 Raisouuement, maintains that there are three terms. The present sensa- 

 tion or sign must, according to him, first evoke from the past an image 

 which resembles it and fuses with it, and the things suggested or inferred 

 are always the contiguous associates of this intermediate image, and not of 

 the immediate sensation. The reader of Chapter XIX will see why I do 

 not believe in the ' image ' in question as a distinct psychic fact. 



f Mental Evolution in Man (1889), chapters iii and iv. See especially 

 pp. 68-80, and later 353, 396. 



