Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty

by George John Romanes

“The question is, Can the sense say anything—make a judgment at all? Can it furnish the blank formula of a judgment—the ‘is’ in ‘A is B’? The grass of the battlefield was green, and the sense gave both the grass and the greenness; but did it affirm that ‘the grass is green’? It may be assumed that ‘grass’ and ‘green’ together form one complex object, which is an object under space and time, and therefore of sense. But against this the rejoinder at once is, that the sense may indeed take in and report (so to speak) a complex object, but that in this case the question is, not about the complex object, but about the complexity of the object. It is one thing to see green grass, and evidently quite another to affirm the greenness of the grass. The difference is all the difference between seeing two things united, and seeing them as united.... 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.[96] And ‘is,’ considered as a substantive verb, as in the example ‘This man is,’ contains in itself the application of the copula of judgment to the most elementary of all abstractions—‘thing’ or ‘something.’ Yet if a being has the power of thinking—‘thing,’ it has the power of transcending space and time by dividing or decomposing the phenomenally one. Here is the point where instinct ends and reason begins.”[97]

It would be easy to add quotations from other writers to the same effect as the above;[98] but these may be held sufficient to give material for the first stage of my criticism, which is of a purely technical character. I affirm that all writers who thus take their stand upon the distinctively human faculty of predication are taking their stand at the wrong place. In other words, without at present disputing whether we have to do with a distinction of kind or of degree, I say, and say confidently, that the distinction in question—i.e. between animal and human intelligence—may be easily proved to occur further back than at the faculty of predication, or the forming of a proposition. The distinction occurs at the faculty of denomination, or the bestowing of a name, known as such. “The simplest element of thought” is not a “judgment:” the simplest element of thought is a concept. That this is the case admits of being easily demonstrated in several different ways.

In the first place, it is evident that there could be no judgments without concepts, just as there could be no propositions without terms. A judgment is the result of a comparison of concepts, and this is the reason why it can only find expression in a proposition, which sets forth the relation between the concepts by bringing into apposition their corresponding terms. Judgments, therefore, are compounds of thought: the elements are concepts.

In the second place, given the power of conceiving, and the germ of judgment is implied, though not expanded into the blossom of formal predication. For whenever we bestow a name we are implicitly judging that the thing to which we apply the name presents the attributes connoted by that name, and thus we are virtually predicating the fact. For example, when I call a man a “Negro,” the very term itself affirms blackness as the distinctive quality of that individual—just as does the equivalent nursery term, “Black-man.” 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. The judgments so formed and pronounced are doubtless not so explicit as is the case when both subject and predicate are associated in the full proposition—“A negro is black;” but in the single term Negro, or Black-man, both these elements were already present, and must have been so if the name were in any degree at all conceptual—i.e. denominative as distinguished from denotative. In the illustration “Negro,” or “Black-man,” it so happens that the connotation of the name is directly given by the etymology of the name; but this circumstance is immaterial. Whether or not the etymology of a connotative name happens to fit the particular subject to which it is applied, the same kind of classificatory judgment is required for any appropriate application of the same. If, with Blumenbach, I am accustomed to call a negro an Ethiopian, when I apply this name to any representative of that race, I am performing the same mental act as my neighbour who calls him a Negro, or my child who calls him a Black-man. If it should be said that in all such cases the act of naming is so immediately due to association that no demand is made upon the powers of judgment, the admission would be a dangerous one for my opponents to make, since the same remark would apply to the full proposition, “That man is black.” Moreover, the objection admits of being easily disposed of by choosing instances of naming where associations have not yet been definitively fixed. If I am travelling in a strange continent, and amid all the unfamiliar flora there encountered I suddenly perceive a plant which I think I know, before I name it to my friend as that plant, I would submit it to close scrutiny—i.e. carefully judge its resemblances to the known or familiar species. In short, all connotative names, when denominatively applied, betoken acts of judgment, which differ from those concerned in full predication only as regards the form of their expression. Or, as Mill very tersely remarks, “whenever the names given to objects convey any information, that is, whenever they have properly any meaning, the meaning resides not in what they denote, but in what they connote.” And although in his elaborate treatment of Names and Propositions he omits expressly to notice the point now before us, it is clearly implied in the above quotation. The point is that connotative names (or denominative terms)[99] are often in themselves of predicative value; and this point is clearly implied in the above quotation, because, whenever “names given to objects convey any information,” the information thus conveyed is virtually predicated: the “meaning” connoted by the name is affirmed in the mere act of bestowing the name, which thus in itself becomes a condensed proposition. “It is a truism of psychology that the terms of a proposition, when closely interrogated, turn out to be nothing but abbreviated judgments.”[100]

This view of the matter, then, is the only one that can be countenanced by psychology. It is likewise the only one that can be countenanced by philology, or the study of language in the making. Of this fact I will adduce abundant evidence in a subsequent chapter, where it will be shown, as Professor Max Müller says, that “every name was originally a proposition.” But at present I am only concerned with one of the most elementary points of purely psychological analysis, and will therefore postpone the independent illumination of the whole philosophy of predication which of late years has been so splendidly furnished by the comparative study of languages.

From whatever point of view, therefore, we look at the matter, we are bound to conclude, either that the term “judgment” must be applied indifferently to the act of denominating and to the act of predicating, or else, if it be restricted to the latter, that it must not be regarded as “the simplest element of thought.” And thus we are led back to the position previously gained while treating of the Logic of Concepts. For we then found that names are the steps of the intellectual ladder whereby we climb into higher and higher regions of ideation; and although our progress is assisted by formal predication, or discursive thought, this is but the muscular energy, so to speak, which would in itself be useless but for the rungs already supplied, and on which alone that energy can be expended. Or, to vary the metaphor, conceptual names are the ingredients out of which is formed the structure of propositions; and, in order that this formation should take place, there must already be in the ingredients that element of vitality which constitutes the vis formativa. Now, this element of vitality is the element of conceptual ideation, already exhibited in every denominative term.

Therefore, for the sake at once of clearness and of brevity, I will hereafter speak of predication as material and formal. By material predication I will mean conceptual denomination, whereby, in the mere act of bestowing a connotative term, we are virtually predicating of the thing thus designated some fact, quality, or relation, which the name bestowed is intended to indicate. By formal predication I will mean the apposition of denominative terms, with the intention of setting forth some relation which is thus expressed as subsisting between them. But, as already observed, I regard this distinction as artificial. Psychologically speaking, there is no line of demarcation between these two kinds of predication. Whether I say “Fool,” or “Thou art a fool,” I am similarly assigning the subject of my remark to a certain category of men: I am similarly giving expression to my judgment with regard to the qualities presented by one particular man. The distinction, then, between what I call material and formal predication is merely a distinction in rhetoric: as a matter of psychology there is no distinction at all.

If to all this it should be objected, in accordance with the psychological doctrines set forth by Mr. Mivart, above quoted, that a judgment as embodied in a proposition differs from a concept as embodied in a name in respect of the copula, and therefore in presenting the idea of existence as existence; I answer, in the first place, that every concept must necessarily present this idea however implicitly; and, in the next place, that however explicitly it may be stated as a judgment, it is not of more conceptual value than that of any other quality belonging to a subject. As regards the first point, when an object, a quality, an action, &c., is named, it is thereby abstracted as a distinct creation of thought, separated out from other things, and made to stand before the mind as a distinct entity (see Chapter IV.). Therefore, in the very act of naming we are virtually predicating existence of the thing named: the power to “think is” is the power concerned in the formation of a concept, not in the apposing of concepts when formed. All that is done in an act of such apposition is to bring together two ideas of two things already conceived as existing: were it not so there could be no-things to compare.[101]

And now, as regards the second point, so far is it from being true that the predication of existence is the essential or most important feature even of a full or formal proposition, that it is really the least essential or least important. For existence is the category to which everything must belong if it is to be judged about at all, and therefore merely to judge that A is and B is, is to form the most barren (or least significant) judgment that can be formed with regard to A or B; and when we bring these two judgments (concepts) together in the proposition A is B, the new judgment which we make has nothing to do with the existence either of A or of B, nor has it really anything to do with existence as such. The existence both of A and of B has been already pre-supposed in the two concepts, and when these two existing things are brought into apposition, no third existence is thereby supposed to have been created. The copula therefore really stands, not as a symbol of existence, but as the symbol of relation, and might just as well be replaced by any other sign (such as =), or, indeed, be dispensed with altogether. “As we use the verb is, so the Latins use their verb est and the Greeks their [Greek: esti] through all its declensions. Whether all other nations of the world have in their several languages a word that answereth to it, or not, I cannot tell; but I am sure they have no need of it. For the placing of two names in order [i.e. in apposition] may serve to signify their consequence, if it were the custom, as well as the words is, to be, and the like. And if it were so, that there were a language without any verb answering to est, or is, or be, yet the men that used it would be not a jot the less capable of inferring, concluding, and of all kind of reasoning than were the Greeks and Latins.” This shrewd analysis by Hobbes is justly said by Mill to be “the only analysis of a proposition which is rigorously true of all propositions without exception;” and Professor Max Müller says of it, “Hobbes, though utterly ignorant of the historical antecedents of language, agrees with us in the most remarkable manner.”[102]

Thus, then, upon the whole, and without further treatment, it may be concluded that whether we look to its simplest manifestations or to its most complex, we must alike conclude that it is the faculty of conception, not that of judgment—the faculty of denomination, not that of predication—which we have to regard as “the simplest element of thought.” Of course, if it were said that these two faculties are one in kind—that in order to conceive we must judge, and in order to name we must predicate—I should have no objection to offer. All I am at present engaged upon is to make it clear that the distinction between man and brute in respect of the Logos must be drawn at the place where this distinction first obtains; and this place is where judgment is concerned with conception, or with the bestowing of names in the sense previously explained as denominative. The subsequent working up of names into propositions is merely a further exhibition of the self-same faculty. 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. And so it is with all other names when conceptually bestowed, because everywhere such names are expressions of conceptual classification—the bringing together of like things, or the separation of unlike. In short, all names which present any conceptual meaning are in themselves condensed propositions, or “material predications;” and only as such can they afterwards become terms, i.e. constitute the essential elements of any more extended proposition, or “formal predication.” Therefore it is the faculty of naming wherein is first displayed—and, according to the doctrine of Nominalism, whereby is first attained—that great and distinctive characteristic of the human mind which Mr. Mivart and those who think with him have in view; and, unless we espouse the doctrine of Realism—which neither these nor any other psychologists with whom I have to do are likely nowadays to countenance,—it is plain that “the simplest element of thought” is a concept.