Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty

by George John Romanes

CHAPTER IX.

SPEECH.

We are now coming to close quarters with our subject. All the foregoing chapters have been arranged with a view to preparing the way for what is hereafter to follow; and, therefore, as already remarked, I have thus far presented material over which I do not think it is possible that any dispute can arise. 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. To say that it obtains with the appearance of language, in the sense of sign-making, is obviously too wide a statement; for, as we have now so fully seen, language, in this widest sense, demonstrably obtains among the lower animals. Consequently, the line must be drawn, not at language or sign-making, but at that particular kind of sign-making which we understand by Speech. Now the distinctive peculiarity of this kind of sign-making—and one, therefore, which does not occur in any other kind—consists in predication, or the using of signs as movable types for the purpose of making propositions. It does not signify whether or not the signs thus used are words. The gestures of Indians and deaf-mutes admit, as we have seen, of being wrought up into a machinery of predication which, for all purposes of practical life, is almost as efficient as speech. The distinction, therefore, resides in the intellectual powers; not in the symbols thereof. 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. Therefore, it belongs to the very essence of predication that it should involve a judgment; and it belongs to the very essence of a judgment that it should admit of being stated in the form of a proposition.[93]

Lastly, just as this is the place where my opponents take a stand, so, as they freely allow, it is the only place where they can take a stand. If once this chasm of speech were bridged, there would be no further chasm to cross. From the simplest judgment which it is possible to make, and therefore from the simplest proposition which it is possible to construct, it is on all hands admitted that human intelligence displays an otherwise uniform or uninterrupted ascent through all the grades of excellence which it afterwards presents. Here, then, and here alone, we have what Professor Max Müller calls the Rubicon of Mind, which separates the brute from the man, and over which, it is alleged, the army of Science can never hope to pass.

In order to present the full difficulty which is here encountered, I will allow it to be stated by the ablest of my opponents. As President of the Biological Section of the British Association in 1879, Mr. Mivart expressed his matured thought upon the subject thus:—

“The simplest element of thought seems to me to be a ‘judgment,’ with intuition of reality concerning some ‘fact,’ regarded as a fact real or ideal. Moreover, this judgment is not itself a modified imagination, because the imaginations which may give occasion to it persist unmodified in the mind side by side with the judgment they have called up. Let us take, as examples, the judgments, ‘That thing is good to eat,’ and ‘Nothing can be and not be at the same time and in the same sense.’ As to the former, we vaguely imagine ‘things good to eat;’ but they must exist beside the judgment, not in it. They can be recalled, compared, and seen to co-exist. So with the other judgment, the mind is occupied with certain abstract ideas, though the imagination has certain vague ‘images’ answering respectively to ‘a thing being,’ and ‘a thing not being,’ and to ‘at the same time’ and ‘in the same sense;’ but the images do not constitute the judgment itself, any more than human ‘swimming’ is made up of limbs and fluid, though without such necessary elements no such swimming could take place.[94]

“This distinction is also shown by the fact that one and the same idea may be suggested to, and maintained in, the mind by the help of the most incongruous images, and very different ideas by the very same image; this we may see to be the case with such ideas as ‘number,’ ‘purpose,’ ‘motion,’ ‘identity,’ &c.

“But the distinctness of ‘thought’ from ‘imagination’ may perhaps be made clearer by the drawing out fully what we really do when we make some simple judgment, as, e.g., ‘A negro is black.’ Here, in the first place, we directly and explicitly affirm that there is a conformity between the external thing, ‘a negro,’ and the external quality ‘blackness’—the negro possessing that quality. We affirm, secondarily and implicitly, a conformity between two external entities and two corresponding internal concepts. And thirdly, and lastly, we also implicitly affirm the existence of a conformity between the subjective judgment and the objective existence.”[95]

I will next allow this matter to be presented in the words of another adversary, and one whom Mr. Mivart approvingly quotes.