Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty

by George John Romanes

If I do not apologize for having occupied so much space over so obvious a point, it is only because I believe that any one who reads these pages will sympathize with my desire to avoid ambiguity, and thus to reduce the question before us to its naked reality. So far, it will be observed, this question has not been touched. I am not disputing that an immense and an extraordinary distinction obtains, and I do not anticipate that either Mr. Mivart or any one else will take exception to this preliminary clearing of the ground, which has been necessitated only on account of my opponents having been careless enough to represent the Proposition as the simplest exhibition of the Logos. But now the time has arrived when we must tackle the distinction in serious earnest.

Wherein does this distinction truly consist? It consists, as I believe all my opponents will allow, in the power which the human being displays of objectifying ideas, or of setting one state of mind before another state, and contemplating the relation between them. 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. For thus it is that these ideas are enabled “to exist beside the judgment, not in it;” thus it is that they may themselves become objects of thought. We have no evidence to show that any animal is capable of thus objectifying its own ideas; and, therefore, we have no evidence that any animal is capable of judgment. Indeed I will go further, and affirm that we have the best evidence which is derivable from what are necessarily ejective sources, to prove that no animal can possibly attain to these excellencies of subjective life. This evidence will gradually unfold itself as we proceed, so at present it is enough to say, in general terms, that it consists in a most cogent proof of the absence in brutes of the needful conditions to the occurrence of these excellencies as they obtain in themselves. From which it follows that the great distinction between the brute and the man really lies behind the faculties both of conception and predication: it resides in the conditions to the occurrence of either. What these conditions are I will consider later on. Meanwhile, and in order that we may be perfectly clear about the all-important distinction which is before us, I will re-state it in other terms.

What is the difference between a recept and a concept? I cannot answer this question more clearly or concisely than in the words of the writer in the Dublin Review before quoted. “The difference is all the difference between seeing two things united, and seeing them as united.” The difference is all the difference between perceiving relations, and perceiving the relations as related, or between cognizing a truth, and recognizing that truth as true. The diving bird, which avoids a rock and fearlessly plunges into the sea, unquestionably displays a receptual knowledge of certain “things,” “relations,” and “truths;” but it does not know any of them as such: although it knows them, it does not know that it knows them: however well it knows them, it does not think them, or regard the things, the relations, and the truths which it perceives as themselves the objects of perception. Now, over and above this merely receptual knowledge, man displays conceptual, which means that he is able to do all these things that the bird cannot do: in other words, he is able to set before his mind all the recepts which he has in common with the bird, to think about them as recepts, and by the mere fact, or in the very act of so doing, to convert them into concepts. Concepts, then, differ from recepts in that they are recepts which have themselves become objects of knowledge, and the condition to their taking on this important character is the presence of self-consciousness in the percipient mind.[103]

I have twice stated the distinction as clearly as I am able; but, in order to do it the fullest justice, I will now render it a third time in the words of Mr. Mivart—some of whose terms I have borrowed in the above paragraph, and therefore need not now repeat. He begins by conveying the distinction as it was stated by Buffon, thus:—

“Far from denying feelings to animals, I concede to them everything except thought and reflection.... They have sensations, but no faculty of comparing them with one another, that is to say they have not the power which produces ideas”—i.e. products of reflection. Then, after alluding to Buffon’s views on the distinction between “automatic memory” and “intellectual memory” (i.e. the distinction which I have recognized in the Diagram attached to my previous work by calling the former “memory” and the latter “recollection”), Mr. Mivart adds:—“The distinction is one quite easy to perceive. That we have automatic memory, such as animals have, is obvious: but the presence of intellectual memory may be made evident by searching our minds (so to speak) for something which we have fully remembered before, and thus intellectually remember to have known, though we cannot now bring it before the imagination. 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.”[104]

Were it necessary, I could quote from his work, entitled Lessons from Nature, sundry further passages expressing the same distinction in other words; but I have already been careful, even to redundancy, in presenting this distinction, not only because it is the distinction on which Mr. Mivart rests his whole argument for the separation of man from the rest of the animal kingdom as a being unique in kind; but still more because it is, as he is careful to point out, the one real distinction which has hitherto always been drawn by philosophers since the time of Aristotle. And, as I have already observed, it is a distinction which I myself fully recognize, and believe to be the most important of all distinctions in psychology. The only point of difference, therefore, between my opinions and those—I will not say of Mr. Mivart, but—of any other or possible opponent who understands the psychology of this subject, is on the question whether, in view of the light which has now been shed on psychology by the theory of evolution, this important distinction is to be regarded as one of degree or as one of kind. I shall now proceed to unfold the reasons which lead me to differ on this point from Mr. Mivart, and so from all the still extensive school of which he is, in my opinion, much the ablest spokesman.

We have seen that the distinction in question consists in the presence or absence of the faculty now fully explained, of reflective thought, and that of this faculty the simplest manifestation is, as alleged by my opponents, that which is afforded by “judgment.” But we have also seen that this faculty of judgment does not first appear in predication, unless we extend the term so as to embrace all acts of denomination. In other words, we have seen that judgment first arises with conception—and necessarily so, seeing that neither of these things can occur without the other, but both arise as direct exhibitions of that faculty of self-conscious or reflective thought of which they are everywhere the immediate expression. I will, therefore, begin with a careful analysis of conceptual judgment.

We must first recur to the distinctions set forth at the close of the last chapter, where it was shown that, without any prejudice to the question touching the distinction between man and brute, there are five different stages of intentional sign-making to be recognized—namely, the indicative, the denotative, the connotative, the denominative, and the predicative. From what has now been said regarding the essentially predicative nature of all conceptual names, we may disregard the last of these distinctions, and consider the denominative phase of language as psychologically identical with the predicative. Similarly, we may now neglect the indicative phase, as one which bears no relation to the matters at present before us. Thus we have to fasten attention only upon the differences between the denotative, the connotative, and the denominative phases of language. This has already been done in general terms; but must now be done in more detail. And for the sake of being clear, even at the risk of being tedious, I will begin by repeating the important distinctions already explained.

When a parrot calls a dog Bow-wow (as a parrot, like a child, may easily be taught to do), the parrot may be said, in one sense of the word, to be naming the dog; but it is not predicating any characters as belonging to a dog, or performing any act of judgment with regard to a dog. Although the bird may never (or but rarely) utter the name save when it sees a dog, this fact is attributable to the laws of association acting only in the receptual sphere: it furnishes no shadow of a reason for supposing that the bird thinks about a dog as a dog, or sets the concept Dog before its mind as a separate object of thought. Therefore, all my opponents must allow that in one sense of the word there may be names without concepts: whether as gestures or as words (vocal gestures), there may be signs of things without these signs presenting any vestige of predicative value. Names of this kind I have called denotative: they are marks affixed to objects, qualities, actions, &c., by receptual association alone.

Next, when a denotative name has been formed and applied as the mark of one thing, its use may be extended to denote also another thing, which is seen to belong to the same class or kind. When denotative names are thus extended, they become what I have called connotative. The degree to which such classificatory extension of a denotative name may take place depends, of course, on the degree in which the mind is able to take cognizance of resemblances or analogies. Now, these degrees are as various as are the degrees of intelligence itself. Long before the differential engine of Conception has come to the assistance of Mind, both animals and human beings (as previously shown) are able to go a long way in the distinguishing of resemblances, or analogies, by means of receptual ideation alone. When such receptual discrimination is expressed by the corresponding extension of denotative names, the degree of connotation which such names may thus acquire depends upon the degree of this receptual discrimination. Even my parrot was able to extend its denotative name for a particular dog to any other dog which it happened to see—thus precisely resembling my child, who extended its first denotative word Star to a candle. Connotation, then, begins in the purely receptual sphere of ideation; and although in man it is afterwards carried up into the conceptual sphere, it is obviously most imperative for the purposes of this analysis to draw a distinction between connotation as receptual and as conceptual.