By pre-conceptual judgments I will understand those acts of virtual or rudimentary judgment which are performed by children subsequent to the “practical inferences” which they share with brutes, but prior to the advent of self-conscious reflection. These pre-conceptual judgments may be expressed either by gestures, connotative classifications, or by both combined. Some instances of them have already been given in the present chapter: further and better instances will be given in the chapters which are to follow.
By conceptual judgments I will understand full and complete judgments in the ordinary acceptation of this term.
Receptual judgment, then, has to do with recepts; pre-conceptual judgment with pre-concepts; and true judgments with true concepts. Or, conversely stated, receptual knowledge leads to receptual judgment (e.g. when a sea-bird dives into water but alights upon land): pre-conceptual knowledge leads to pre-conceptual judgment in the statement of such knowledge (e.g. when a child, by extending the name of a dog to the picture of a dog, virtually affirms, though it does not conceive, the resemblance which it perceives): and, lastly, conceptual knowledge leads to conceptual or veritable judgment, in the statement of such knowledge known as knowledge (e.g. when, in virtue of his powers of reflective thought, a man not only states a truth, but states that truth as true).
Thus far I doubt whether my opponents will find it easy to meet me. They may, of course, cavil at some or all of the above distinctions; but, if so, it is for them to show cause for complaint. They have raised objections to the theory of evolution on purely psychological grounds. I meet their objections upon these their own grounds, and therefore the only way in which they can answer me is by showing that there is something wrong in my psychological analysis. This I fearlessly invite them to do. For all the distinctions which I have made I have made out of consideration to the exigencies of their argument. Although these distinctions may appear somewhat bewilderingly numerous, I do not anticipate that any competent psychologist will complain of them on account of their having been over-finely drawn. For each of them marks off an important territory of ideation, and all the territories so marked off must be separately noted, if the alleged distinction of kind between one and another is to be seriously investigated. In his essays upon the theory of evolution, Mr. Mivart not unfrequently complains of the disregard of psychological analysis which is betokened by any expression of opinion to the effect, that as between one great territory of ideation and another there is only a difference of degree. But surely this complaint comes with an ill grace from a writer who bases an opposite opinion upon a precisely similar neglect—or upon a bare statement of the greatest and most obvious of all the distinctions in psychology, without so much as any attempt to analyze it. Therefore, if my own attempt to do this has erred on the side of overelaboration, it has done so only on account of my desire to do full justice to the opposite side. In the result, I claim to have shown that if it is possible to suggest a difference of kind between any of the levels of ideation which have now been defined, this can only be done at the last of them—or where the advent of self-consciousness enables a mind, not only to know, but to know that it knows; not only to receive knowledge, but also to conceive it; not only to connotate, but also to denominate; not only to state a truth, but also to state that truth as true. The question, therefore, which now lies before us is that as to the nature of this self-consciousness—or, more accurately, whether the great and peculiar distinction which this attribute confers upon the human intellect is to be regarded as a distinction of degree only, or as a distinction of kind. To answer this question we must first investigate the rise of self-consciousness in the only place where its rise can be observed, namely, in the psychogenesis of a child.[111]
CHAPTER X.
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS.
My contention in this chapter will be that, given the protoplasm of the sign-making faculty so far organized as to have reached the denotative stage; and given also the protoplasm of judgment so far organized as to have reached the stage of stating a truth, without the mind being yet sufficiently developed to be conscious of itself as an object of thought, and therefore not yet able to state to itself a truth as true; by a confluence of these two protoplasmic elements an act of fertilization is performed, such that the subsequent processes of mental organization proceed apace, and soon reach the stage of differentiation between subject and object.
And here, to avoid misapprehension, I may as well make it clear at the outset that in all which is to follow I am in no way concerned with the philosophy of this change, but only with its history. On the side of its philosophy no one can have a deeper respect for the problem of self-consciousness than I have; for no one can be more profoundly convinced than I am that the problem on this side does not admit of solution. In other words, so far as this aspect of the matter is concerned, I am in complete agreement with the most advanced idealist; and hold that in the datum of self-consciousness we each of us possess, not merely our only ultimate knowledge, or that which only is “real in its own right,” but likewise the mode of existence which alone the human mind is capable of conceiving as existence, and therefore the conditio sine quâ non to the possibility of an external world. With this aspect of the question, however, I am in no way concerned. 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. It is no less true to-day than it was in the time of Soloman, that “as thou knowest not how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child, thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit.”