376 Animal Life and Intelligence. 



If the views that I have thus very briefly sketched (for 

 I have no right to offer an opinion on a question of 

 linguistic science) be correct, language has made analysis, 

 isolation, and conceptual thought possible. But there may 

 have been a transitory stage when the word-signs stood for 

 predominants, not yet for isolates. Granting the possibility 

 or probability of this, I am prepared to follow Professor 

 Max Miiller in his contention that language and thought, 

 from the close of that stage onward, are practically in- 

 separable, and have advanced hand-in-hand. It is true 

 that I can now think out a chemical or physical problem 

 without the use of words — the stages of the experimental 

 work being visualized, just as a chess-player may think out 

 a game in pictures of the successive moves. But, his- 

 torically, I believe the power to do this has been acquired 

 through language ; and if I am able temporarily to isolate 

 and analyze without language, thought being at times a 

 little ahead of naming, yet the fact remains that language 

 is absolutely necessary to make such advances good, if not 

 for me, at any rate for man. 



And here I would make one more suggestion. Professor 

 Max Miiller, as the result of analysis of the Aryan language, 

 finds a comparatively small number of roots which he says 

 are in all cases symbolic of concepts. Yes, for us now they 

 symbolize concepts. But in their inception may they not 

 have been symbolic of predominants ? Have we not in 

 them the signs for predominants not yet converted for the 

 primitive utterers into isolates ? May not these have been 

 the stepping-stones from the perceptual predominants of 

 animal man, to the conceptual isolates of rational man ? 

 Or, to modify the analogy, may they not have been the 

 embryonic wings by which the human race were floated off 

 from the things of sense into the free but tenuous air of 

 abstract thought ? 



Lastly, before taking leave of the subject of this chapter, 

 I am most anxious that it should not be thought that, in 

 contending that intelligence is not reason, I wish in any 

 way to disparage intelligence. Nine-tenths at least of the 



