1892.] Mental Evolution in Man and Lower Animals. 601 
the specified action or relation. .. . A verb substantive such — 
as is commonly conceived, vivifying all connected speech and 
binding together the terms of every logical proposition, is much 
upon a footing with the phlogiston of the chemists of the last 
generation—voz et præterea nihil. . . . If a given subject be ‘I,’ 
‘thou,’ ‘he,’ ‘this,’, ‘that’ ‘one;’ if it be ‘here,’ ‘there,’ 
‘yonder,’ ‘thus, ‘in, ‘on, ‘at, ‘by;’ if .it bo ‘sits,’ 
‘ stands,’ ‘remains,’ or ‘appears’ we need no ghost to tell us 
that it is, nor any grammarian or metaphysician to proclaim 
that recondite fact in formal terms.” 
It seems then that no more unfortunate point could have 
been chosen than the use of the verb “to be” as constituting 
the Rubicon of mind; it has only served to accumulate proofs 
that there is no Rubicon in the sense of a distinct barrier 
between the minds of men and animals, and that if a dividing 
line be arbitrarily drawn it must be not between man and 
brute, but between the lower animals, young children and 
savages on the one hand and civilized man capable of true 
abstract ideas on the other. 
A young child has made a distinct step in advance when he 
speaks of himself in the first person. But many tribes of 
savages have never yet risen to this consciousness of the 
“ego;” but for such an expression as “I will eat the rice” we 
have recourse to the form “ The eating-of-me-the-rice.” * 
If a child exclaims “black man” at the sight of a negro he 
expresses the same idea that we do in saying “that man is 
black ;” if he says “dit ki” (sister is crying), “dit dow ga” 
(sister is down on the grass), “dat a big bow-wow” (that is a 
large dog), he is implicitly predicating certain facts and form- 
ing certain judgments precisely as if he formally used the 
copula. “The child perceives a certain fact and states the per- 
ception in words in order to communicate information of the 
acts to other minds, just as an animal under similar circum- 
stances will employ a gesture or vocal sign.” A cat cannot 
express in words the ideas “my kitten is shut in a drawer; 
‘Malayan and Polynesian Languages. Mental Evolution of Man, p. 313. 
*See p. 208, Mental Evolution of Man. 
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