Upon the whole, then, it appears to me perfectly evident that language is quite as much the antecedent as it is the consequent of self-consciousness. We have seen that in its first beginnings, or before the child is able to state a truth as true, what I have called rudimentary or pre-conceptual predication is concerned only with existence as objective or ejective: all these propositions, which are made by children during the first two years of their life, have reference to objects of sense, states of feeling, &c.; but never to self as self, and therefore never to truths as true. But as soon as the protoplasm of predication, or sign-making at this stage of elaboration, begins to mix freely with the protoplasm of judgment, or the logic of recepts at that stage of elaboration, an intimate movement of action and reaction ensues: the judgments are rendered clearer and more comprehensive by being thrown into the formal shape of even rudimentary propositions, while the latter are promoted in their development by the growing powers of judgment. And when this advancing organization of faculties has proceeded to the extent of enabling the mind incipiently to predicate its own states, the mental organism may be said for the first time to be quickening into the life of true self-consciousness.[128]
CHAPTER XI.
THE TRANSITION IN THE INDIVIDUAL.
We are now, I think, in possession of sufficient material to begin our answer to the question with which we set out—namely, Is it conceivable that the human mind can have arisen by way of a natural genesis from the minds of the higher quadrumana? I maintain that the material now before us is sufficient to show, not only that this is conceivable, but inevitable.
First of all we must remember that we share in common with the lower animals not only perceptual, but also what I have termed receptual life. Thus far, no difference of kind can be even so much as suggested. The difference then, be it one of kind or of degree, concerns only those superadded elements of psychology which are peculiar to man, and which, following other psychologists, I have termed conceptual. I say advisedly the elements, because it is by no one disputed that all differences of conceptual life are differences of degree, or that from the ideation of a savage to that of a Shakespeare there is unquestionably a continuous ascent. The only question, then, that obtains is as to the relation between the highest recept of a brute and the lowest concept of a man.
Now, in considering this question we must first remember to what an extraordinarily high level of adaptive ideation the purely receptual life of brutes is able to carry them. If we contrast the ideation of my cebus, which honestly investigated the mechanical principle of a screw, and then applied his specially acquired knowledge to screws in general—if we contrast this ideation with that of palæolithic man, who for untold thousands of years made no advance upon the chipping of flints, we cannot say that, when gauged by the practical test of efficiency or adaptation, the one appears to be very much in advance of the other. Or, if we remember that these same men never hit upon the simple expedient of attaching a chipped flint to a handle, so as to make a hatchet out of a chisel,[129] it cannot be said that in the matter of mechanical discovery early conceptual life displayed any great advance upon the high receptual life of my cebus. Nevertheless, I have allowed—nay insisted—that no matter how elaborate the structure of receptual knowledge may be, or how wonderful the adaptive action it may prompt, a “practical inference” or “receptual judgment” is always separated from a conceptual inference or true judgment by the immense distinction that it is not itself an object of knowledge. No doubt it is a marvellous fact that by means of receptual knowledge alone a monkey should be able to divine the mechanical principle of a screw, and afterwards apply his discovery to all cases of screws. But even here there is nothing to show that the monkey ever thought about the principle as a principle; indeed, we may rest well assured that he cannot possibly have done so, seeing that he was not in possession of the intellectual instruments—and, therefore, of the antecedent conditions—requisite for the purpose. All that the monkey did was to perceive receptually certain analogies: but he did not conceive them, or constitute them objects of thought as analogies. He was, therefore, unable to predicate the discovery he had made, or to set before his own mind as knowledge the knowledge which he had gained.
Or, to take another illustration, the bird which saw three men go into a building, and inferred that one must still have remained when only two came out, conducted the inference receptually: the only data she had were those supplied by differential sense-perceptions. But although these data were sufficient for the purpose of conducting what Mr. Mivart calls a “practical inference,” and so of enabling her to know that a man still remained behind, they were clearly not enough to enable her to know the numerical relations as relations, or in any way to predicate to herself, 3-2=1. In order to do this, the bird would have required to quit the region of receptual knowledge, and rise to that of conceptual: she would have required in some form or another to have substituted symbols for ideas. It makes no difference, so far as this distinction is concerned, when we learn that in dealing with certain savages “each sheep must be paid for separately: thus, suppose two sticks of tobacco to be the rate of exchange for one sheep, it would sorely puzzle a Dammara to take two sheep and give him four sticks.”[130] All that such facts show is that in some respects the higher receptual life of brutes attains almost as high a level of ideation as the lower conceptual life of man; and although this fact no doubt greatly lessens the difficulty which my opponents allege as attaching to the supposition that the two were genetically continuous, it does not in itself dispose of the psychological distinction between a recept and a concept.
This distinction, as we have now so often seen, consists in a recept being an idea which is not itself an object of knowledge, whereas a concept, in virtue of having been named by a self-conscious agent, is an idea which stands before the mind of that agent as an idea, or as a state of mind which admits of being introspectively contemplated as such. But although we have in this distinction what I agree with my opponents in regarding as the greatest single distinction that is to be met with in psychology, I altogether object to their mode of analyzing it. For what they do is to take the concept in its most highly developed form, and then contrast this with the recept of an animal. Nay, as we have seen, they even go beyond a concept, and allege that “the simplest element of thought” is a judgment as bodied forth in a proposition—i.e. two concepts plus the predication of a relationship between them! Truly, we might as well allege that the simplest element of matter is H2SO4, or the simplest element of sound a bar of the C Minor Symphony. Obviously, therefore, or as a mere matter of the most rudimentary psychological analysis, if we say that the simplest element of thought is a judgment, we must extend the meaning of this word from the mental act concerned in full predication, to the mental act concerned in the simplest conception.