Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty

by George John Romanes

(4) Higher Concepts, comprising all the further excellencies of human thought.

Higher Recepts, then, are what may be conveniently termed Pre-concepts:[107] they occupy the interval between the receptual life of brute and the earliest dawn of the conceptual life of man. 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. Of course my object eventually is to show that in the history of a growing child, just as sensations give rise to percepts, and percepts to recepts (as they do among animals), so do recepts give rise to pre-concepts, pre-concepts to concepts, concepts to propositions, and propositions to syllogisms. But in now supplying this intermediate link of pre-concepts I am not in any way pre-judging the issue: I am merely marking out the ground for discussion. No one of my opponents can dispute my facts, which are too obvious to admit of question. Therefore, if they object to my classification of them so far as the novel division of pre-concepts is concerned, it must be because they think that by instituting this division I am surreptitiously bringing the mind of a child nearer to that of an animal than they deem altogether safe. What, then, I ask, would they have me do? If I fail to institute this division, I should have to prejudice the question indeed. Either there is some distinction between the naming powers of a parrot and those of a young child, or else there is not. If there is no distinction, so much the better for the purposes of my argument. But I allow that there is a distinction, and I draw it at the first place where it can possibly be said that the intelligence of a child differs in any way at all from that of a parrot—i.e. where the naming powers of a child demonstrably excel those of a parrot, or any other brute. If this place happens to be before the rise of conceptual powers, I am not responsible for the fact; nor in stating it am I at all disparaging the position of any opponent who takes his stand upon these powers as distinctive of man. If his position were worth anything before, it cannot be affected by my drawing attention to the fact that, while a parrot will extend its denotative name of a dog from a terrier to a setter, it will not follow a child any further in the process of receptual connotation.

Or, to put it in another way, when the child says Bow-wow to a setter, after having learnt this name for a terrier, it is either judging a resemblance and predicating a fact, or else it is doing neither of these things. If my opponents elect to say that the child is doing both these things, there is an end of the only issue between us; for in that case a parrot also is able both to judge and to predicate. On the other hand, if my opponents adopt the wiser course, and accept my distinction between names as receptual and conceptual, they must also follow me in recognizing the border-land of pre-concepts as lying between the recepts of a bird and the concepts of a man—i.e. the territory which is first occupied by the higher receptual life of a child before this passes into the conceptual life of a man,—for that such a border-land does exist I will prove still more incontestably later on. 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.

Now, if this is the case with regard to naming, clearly it must also be the case with regard to judging: if there is a stage of pre-conception, there must also be a stage of pre-judgment. For we have seen that it is of the essence of a judgment that it should be concerned with concepts: if the mind be concerned merely with recepts, no act of true judgment can be said to have been performed. When a child says Bow-wow to the picture of a dog, no one can maintain that he is actually judging the resemblance of the picture to a dog, unless it be supposed that for this act of receptual classification distinctively human powers of conceptual thought are required. But, as just shown, no opponent of mine can afford to adopt this supposition, because behind the case of the child there stands that of the parrot. True, the parrot does not proceed in its receptual classification further than to extend its name for a particular dog to other living dogs; but if any one were foolish enough to stake his whole argument on so slender a distinction as this—to maintain that at the place where the connotation of a child first surpasses that of a parrot we have evidence of a psychological distinction of kind, on the sole ground that the child has begun to surpass the parrot—it would be enough for me to remark that not every parrot will thus extend its denotative sign from one dog to another of greatly unlike appearance. Different birds display different degrees of intelligence in this respect. Most of them will say Bow-wow, will bark, or utter any other denotative sign which they may have learnt or invented, when they see dogs more or less resembling the one to which the denotative sign was originally applied; but it is not every parrot which will thus extend the sign from a terrier to a mastiff or a Newfoundland. Therefore, if any one were to maintain that the difference between the intelligence which can discern, and one which cannot discern, the likeness of a dog in the image or the picture of a dog, is a difference of kind, consistency should lead him to draw a similar distinction between the intelligence which can discern, and one which cannot discern, the likeness of a terrier to a mastiff. But, if so, the intelligence of one parrot would be different in kind from that of another parrot; and the child’s intelligence at one age would differ in kind from the intelligence of that same child when a week or two older—both of which statements would be manifestly absurd. The truth can only be that up to the point where the intelligence of the child surpasses that of the bird they are both in the receptual stage of sign-making; and that the only reason why the child does surpass the bird is not, in the first instance, because the child there suddenly attains the power of conceptual ideation, but because it gradually attains a higher level of receptual ideation. This admits of direct proof from the fact that animals more intelligent than parrots are unquestionably able to recognize sculptured and even pictorial representations: hence there can be no doubt that if talking birds had attained a similar level of intelligence—or if the other and more intelligent animals had been able, like the talking birds, to use denotative signs,—the child would not have parted company with the brute at quite so early a stage of receptual nomenclature.[108]

What, then, are we to say about the faculty of judgment in relation to these three stages of ideation—namely, the receptual, pre-conceptual, and conceptual? We can only institute the parallel and consequent distinction between judgment as receptual, pre-conceptual, and conceptual.[109] As now so often stated, the distinguishing features of a judgment as fully displayed in any act of formal predication, are the bringing together in self-conscious thought of two concepts, and the distinguishing of some relation between them as such. Therefore we do not say that a brute judges when, without any self-conscious thought, it brings together certain reminiscences of its past experience in the form of recepts, and translates for us the results of its ideation by the performance of what Mr. Mivart calls “practical inferences.” Therefore, also, if a brute which is able to name each of two recepts separately (as is done by a talking bird), were to name the two recepts simultaneously when thus combined in an act of “practical inference,” although there would then be the outward semblance of a proposition, we should not be strictly right in calling it a proposition. It would, indeed, be the statement of a truth perceived; but not the statement of a truth perceived as true.[110]

Now, if all this be admitted in the case of a brute—as it must be by any one who takes his stand on the faculty of true or conceptual judgment,—obviously it must also be admitted in the case of the growing child. In other words, if it can be proved that a child is able to state a truth before it can state a truth as true, it is thereby proved that in the psychological history of every human being there is first the incompleted kind of judgment required for dealing with receptual knowledge, and so for stating truths perceived, and next the completed judgment, which deals with conceptual knowledge, and so is enabled to state truths perceived as true. Of course the condition to the raising of this lower kind of judgment (if for convenience we agree so to term it) into the higher, is given by the advent of self-consciousness; and therefore the place where statement of truth passes into predication of truth must be determined by the place at which this kind of consciousness first supervenes. Where it does first supervene we shall presently have to consider. Meanwhile I am but endeavouring to make clear the fact that, unless my opponents abandon their position altogether, they must allow that there is some difference to be recognized between the connotative powers of a parrot and the connotative powers of a man. But if they do allow this, they must further allow that between the place where the connotative powers of a child first surpass those of a parrot, and the place where those powers first become truly conceptual, there is a large tract of ideation which it is impossible to ignore. In order, therefore, not to prejudice the question before us, I have thus far confined myself to a mere designation of these great and obvious distinctions. But seeing that even this preliminary step has necessitated a great deal of explanation, I feel it may conduce to clearness if I end the present chapter with a tabular statement of the sundry distinctions in question.

By receptual judgments I will understand the same order of ideation as Mr. Mivart expresses by his term “practical inferences of brutes,” instances of which have already been given in Chapter III.