George John Romanes

“ For we must never forget the important fact that thought is quite as much the effect as it is the cause of language, whether of speech or of gesture; and seeing how inferior gesture is to speech as a system of language, especially in regard to precision and abstraction, I do not think it probable that, in the absence of speech, gesture alone would have supplied the exact and delicate conditions which are essential to the growth of any highly elaborate ideation. ”

“ To utter the name Negro, therefore, or the name Black-man, is to form and pronounce at least two judgments touching an individual object of sensuous perception—to wit, that it is a man, and that he is black. ”

“ If it is true that “the proper study of mankind is man,” assuredly the study of nature has never before reached a territory of thought so important in all its aspects as that which in our own generation it is for the first time approaching. ”

“ A pre-concept, therefore, is that kind of higher recept which is not to be met with in any brute; but which occurs in the human being after surpassing the brute and before attaining self-consciousness. Be it observed that in thus coining the words higher recepts or pre-concepts, I am not in any way prejudicing the case of my opponents; I am merely marking off a certain territory of ideation which has now for the first time been indicated. ”

“ What I have hitherto been endeavouring to do is to reveal clearly that the question whether or not there is any difference between the brute and the man in respect of abstraction, is nothing more than a question of terminology. The real question will arise only when we come to treat of the faculty of language: the question before us now is merely a question of psychological classification, or of the nomenclature of ideas. ”

“ And as with memory, so with other of our mental powers, we may, I think, distinguish between a higher and a lower faculty of each; between our higher, self-conscious, reflective mental acts—the acts of our intellectual faculty—and those of our merely sensitive power. This distinction I believe to be one of the most fundamental of all the distinctions of biology, and to be one the apprehension of which is a necessary preliminary to a successful investigation of animal psychology. ”

“ But long after this first rude beginning of articulate speech, the language of tone and gesture would have continued as much the most important machinery of communication: the half-human creature now before our imagination would probably have struck us as a wonderful adept at making significant sounds and movements both as to number and variety; but in all probability we should scarcely have been able to notice the already-developing germ of articulation. ”

“ Alike from the case of the talking bird, of the young child, and of early man (so far as he has left any traces of his psychology in the structure of language) , I have demonstrated that prior to the stage of denomination there are the stages of indication, denotation, and receptual connotation. These are the psychological stepping-stones across that “Rubicon of Mind,” which, owing to their neglect, has seemed to be impassable. The Concept (and, a fortiori, the Proposition) is not a structure of ideation which is presented to us without a developmental history. ”

“ Hence, we may broadly distinguish between concepts as of two orders—namely, those which have to do with recepts, and those which have to do with other concepts. For a concept is a concept even though it be nothing more than a named recept; and it is still a concept, even though it stands for the highest generalization of thought. I will make this distinction yet more clear by means of better illustrations. ”

“ I desire to show that in the one province, as in the other, the light which has been shed by the doctrine of evolution is of a magnitude which we are now only beginning to appreciate; and that by adopting the theory of continuous development from the one order of mind to the other, we are able scientifically to explain the whole mental constitution of man, even in those parts of it which, to former generations, have appeared inexplicable. ”

“ According to Professor Max Müller, “the science of language has proved by irrefragable evidence that human thought, in the true sense of that word—that is, human language—did not proceed from the concrete to the abstract, but from the abstract to the concrete. Roots, the elements out of which all language has been constructed, are abstract, never concrete; and it is by predicating these abstract concepts of this or that, by localizing them here or there, in fact by applying the category of οὐϚία or substance, to the roots, that the first foundation of our language and our thought were laid.” ”

“ So that a man means, it matters not by what system of signs he expresses his meaning: the distinction between him and the brute consists in his being able to mean a proposition. Now, the kind of mental act whereby a man is thus enabled to mean a proposition is called by psychologists an act of Judgment. Predication, or the making of a proposition, is nothing more nor less than the expression of a judgment; and a judgment is nothing more nor less than the apprehension of whatever meaning it may be that a proposition serves to set forth. ”

“ To sow, to dig, to spin, &c., are names of particular actions; to labour is the name of a more general action; to live is the symbol of a concept yet more general. And it is obvious that here, as previously, the more general concepts are built out of the more special.
Later on I will adduce evidence to show that, whether we look to the growing infant or to the history of mankind as newly unearthed by the researches of the philologist, we alike find that no one of these divisions of simple concepts—namely, nouns, adjectives, and verbs—appears to present priority over the others. ”

“ For it is thus shown to be a matter of observable fact that, whatever may have been the origin or the history of human intelligence in the past, as it now exists—or, rather, as in every individual case it now comes into existence—it proves itself to be no exception to the general law of evolution: it unquestionably does admit of gradual growth from a zero level, and without such a gradual growth we have no evidence of its becoming. ”

“ Darwin’s suggestion, I think it is almost certain that the faculty of articulate sign-making was a product of much later evolution, so that the creature who first presented this faculty must have already been more human than “ape-like.” This Homo alalus stands before the mind’s eye as an almost brutal object, indeed; yet still, erect in attitude, shaping flints to serve as tools and weapons, living in tribes or societies, and able in no small degree to communicate the logic of his recepts by means of gesture-signs, facial expressions, and vocal tones. ”

“ But, under another point of view, such a combination of simple ideas is only then entitled to be regarded as a concept, when it has been conceived by the mind as a concept, or when, in virtue of having been bodied forth in a name, it stands before the mind as a distinct and organic offspring of mind—so becoming an object as well as a product of ideation. For then only can the abstract idea be known as abstract, and then only can it be available as a definite creation of thought, capable of being built into any further and more elaborate structure of ideation. ”

“ The quotations which I have given conclusively prove that “every word must originally have been a sentence;” or, in my own terminology, a pre-conceptual proposition of precisely the same kind as that which is employed by a young child. If it be replied that the young child is without self-consciousness, while the primitive man was not without self-consciousness, this would merely be to beg the whole question on which we [356] are engaged, and, moreover, to beg it in the teeth of every antecedent probability, as well as of every actual analogy, to which appeal can possibly be made. ”

“ Any strong and highly interesting feeling, connected with one attribute of a group, spontaneously classifies all objects according as they possess, or do not possess, that attribute. We may be tolerably certain that the things capable of satisfying hunger form a perfectly distinct class in the mind of any of the more intelligent animals; quite as much as if they were able to use or understand the word food. We here see in a strong light the important truth that hardly anything universal can be affirmed in psychology except the laws of association. ”

“ Well, we have seen that here, again, every one agrees in regarding the possibility of self-consciousness to be given in the faculty of language. Whether or not we suppose that these two faculties are one—that neither could exist without the other, and, therefore, that we may follow the Greeks in assigning to them the single name of Logos,—at least it is as certain as the science of psychology can make it, that within the four corners of human experience a self-conscious personality cannot be led up to in any other way than through the medium of language. ”

“ Psychologists are agreed that what they call particular [23] ideas, or ideas of particular objects, are of the nature of mental images, or memories of such objects—as when the sound of a friend’s voice brings before my mind the idea of that particular man. Psychologists are further agreed that what they term general ideas arise out of an assemblage of particular ideas, as when from my repeated observation of numerous individual men I form the idea of Man, or of an abstract being who comprises the resemblances between all these individual men, without regard to their individual differences. ”

“ But now we come to that particular exhibition of the sign-making faculty which not only appears to be peculiar to man, but which obviously presents so great an advance upon all the lower phases hitherto considered, that it is the place where my opponents have chosen to take their stand. When a man maintains that there is a difference of kind between animal and human intelligence, he naturally feels himself under some obligation to indicate the point where this difference obtains. ”

“ It is as true of judgment when displayed in denomination as it is of judgment when displayed in predication, that “it is not itself a modified imagination, because the imaginations which may give rise to it persist unmodified in the mind side by side with it.” For, as we have seen, the act of denominating (as distinguished from denotating) is in and of itself an act of predicating. When a naturalist bestows a name upon a new species of plant or animal, he has judged a resemblance and predicates a fact—i.e. that the hitherto unnamed form belongs to certain genus or kind. ”

“ The power to “think is”—or, as I should prefer to state it, the power to think at all—is the power which is given by introspective reflection in the light of self-consciousness. It is because the human mind is able, so to speak, to stand outside of itself, and thus to constitute its own ideas the subject-matter of its own thought, that it is capable of judgment in the technical sense above explained, whether in the act of conception or in that of predication. ”

“ But if it could be shown—or even rendered in any degree presumable—that this distinctly human power of forming truly general ideas arose de novo with the first birth of articulate speech, assuredly my whole analysis would be destroyed: the human mind would be shown to present a quality different in origin—and, therefore, in kind—from all the lower orders of intelligence: the law of continuity would be interrupted at the terminal phase: an impassable gulf would be fixed between the brute and the man. ”

“ Now, of course, if the human will differs from the animal will in any important feature or attribute such as this, the fact must be duly taken into account during the course of our subsequent analysis. At present, however, we are only engaged upon a preliminary sketch of the points of resemblance between animal and human psychology. So far, therefore, as we are now concerned with the will, we have only to note that up to the point where the volitions of a man begin to surpass those of a brute in respect of complexity, refinement, and foresight, no one disputes identity of kind. ”

“ If a brute could think ‘is,’ brute and man would be brothers. ‘Is,’ as the copula of a judgment, implies the mental separation, and recombination of two terms that only exist united in nature, and can therefore never have impressed the sense except as one thing. ”

“ There is, then, as a matter of observable fact, a territory of ideation which separates the highest recepts of a brute from the lowest concepts of a human being; and all that my term pre-conception is designed to do is to name this intervening territory. ”

“ But the point on which I desire to fasten attention at present is the enormous leverage which is furnished to the faculty of ideation by thus using words as the mental equivalents of ideas. For by the help of these symbols we climb into higher and higher regions of abstraction: by thinking in verbal signs we think, as it were, with the semblance of ideas: we dispense altogether with the necessity of actual images, whether of precepts or of recepts: we quit the sphere of sense, and rise to that of thought. ”

“ And the only words that I can find to have been used by any previous writers to designate the ideas concerned in that lower kind of generalization which does not depend on language, are the words above given—namely, Complex, Compound, and Mixed. Now, none of these words are so good as the word General, because none of them express the notion of genus or class; and the great distinction between the idea which an animal or an infant has, say of an individual man and of men in general, is not that the one idea is simple, and the other complex, compound, or mixed ”

“ The veriest tyro in natural science is aware that, if there is any truth at all in the general theory of descent, we are everywhere compelled to see that the conditions which determine the development of a species in any direction are always of a complex character. Why one species should remain constant through inconceivably enormous lapses of geological time, while others pass through a rich and varied history of upward change—why this should be so in any case we cannot say. ”

“ If you say that this is conceptual judgment, you destroy the basis of your own distinction between man and brute, because then you must also say that brutes conceptually judge—the child as yet not having attained to conceptual self-consciousness. If, on the other hand, you say that here you have not conceptual judgment, inasmuch as you have not self-consciousness, I ask at what stage in the subsequent development of the child’s intelligence you would consider conceptual judgment to arise. ”

“ The flame of a candle is not always equally bright or flickering; tactile, sapid, olfactory, and auditive impressions do not always strike the child’s sensorium with the same intensity, nor during the same length of time. This is why the recollections of individual forms, although strongly graven on their intelligence, lose by degrees their first precision, so that the idea of a tree, for instance, furnished by direct and perfectly distinct memories, comes back to the mind in a vague and indistinct form, which might be taken for a general idea. ”

“ Each shell is the product of life, but becomes in turn the support of new life. In the same manner each word is the product of thought, but becomes in turn a new support for the growth of thought.
It seems needless to say more in order to show the immense importance of sign-making to the development of ideation—the fact being one of universal recognition by writers of every school. I will, therefore, now pass on to the theme of the present chapter, which is that of tracing in further detail the logic of this faculty, or the method of its development. ”

“ For even a precocious child does not begin to make any considerable use of words as signs until it is well on into its second year, while usually this stage is not reached until the third. And, at whatever age it is reached, the general intelligence of the child is not only much in advance of that of any existing brute, but the direction in which this advance is most conspicuous is just the direction where, in the present connection, it is most suggestive—namely, in that of natural sign-making by tone and gesture. ”

“ Just as the functions of an embryologist are confined to tracing the mere history of developmental changes of living structure, and just as he is thus as far as ever from throwing any light upon the deeper questions of the how and the why of life; so in seeking to indicate the steps whereby self-consciousness has arisen from the lower stages of mental structure, I am as far as any one can be from throwing light upon the intrinsic nature of that the probable genesis of which I am endeavouring to trace. ”

“ In other words, there is thus shown to be even less reason to regard the advent of self-consciousness as marking a psychological difference of kind, than there would be so to regard the advent of those higher powers of conceptual ideation which subsequently—though as gradually—supervene between early childhood and youth. Yet no one has hitherto ventured to suggest that the intelligence of a child and the intelligence of a youth display a difference of kind. ”

“ By failing to observe this real distinction between classification as receptual and conceptual—i.e. as given immediately in the act of perception itself, or as elaborated of set purpose through the agency of introspective thought, Professor Max Müller founds his whole argument on another and an unreal distinction: he everywhere regards the bestowing of a name as in itself a sufficient proof of conceptual thought, and therefore constitutes the faculty of denotation, equally with that of denomination, the distinctive criterion of a self-conscious mind. ”

“ The first was that although the advance to true self-consciousness from lower grades of mental development is no doubt a very great and important matter, still it is not so great and important in comparison with what this development is afterwards destined to become, as to make us feel that it constitutes any distinction sui generis—or even, perhaps, the principal distinction—between the man and the brute. For even when self-consciousness does arise, and has become fairly well developed, the powers of the human mind are still in an almost infantile condition. ”