And, now, lastly, the second supplementary consideration which I have to adduce is, that even in the case of a fully developed self-conscious intelligence, both receptual and pre-conceptual ideation continue to play an important part. That is to say, even in the full-summed powers of the human intellect, the three descriptions of ideation which I have distinguished are so constantly and so intimately blended together, that analysis of the adult mind corroborates the fact already yielded by analysis of the infantile mind, namely, that the distinctions (which I have been obliged to draw in order to examine the allegations of my opponents) are all essentially or intrinsically artificial. My position is that Mind is everywhere continuous, and if for purposes of analysis or classification we require to draw lines of demarcation between the lower and the higher faculties thereof, I contend that we should only do so as an evolutionist classifies his animal or vegetable species: higher or lower do not betoken differences of origin, but differences of development. And just as the naturalist finds a general corroboration of this view in the fact that structural and functional characters are carried upwards from lower to higher forms of life, thus knitting them all together in the bonds of organic evolution; so may the psychologist find that even the highest forms of human intelligence unmistakably share the more essential characters met with in the lower, thus bearing testimony to their own lineage in a continuous system of mental evolution.
Let us, then, briefly contemplate the relations that obtain in the adult human mind between the boasted faculties of conceptual judgment, and the lower faculties of non-conceptual. Although I agree with my opponents in holding that predication (in the strict sense of the term) is dependent on introspection, I further hold that not every statement made by adult man is a predication in this sense: the vast majority of our verbal propositions are made for the practical purposes of communication, or without the mind pausing to contemplate the propositions as such in the light of self-consciousness. When I say “A negro is black,” I do not require to think all the formidable array of things that Mr. Mivart says I affirm[139]; and, on the other hand, when I perform an act of conscious introspection, I do not always require to perform an act of mental predication. No doubt in many cases, or in those where highly abstract ideation is concerned, this independence of the two faculties arises from each having undergone so much elaboration by the assistance which it has derived from the other, that both are now, so to speak, in possession of a large body of organized material on which to operate, without requiring, whensoever they are exercised, to build up the structure of this material ab initio. Thus, to take an example, when I say “Heat is a mode of motion,” I am using what is now to me a merely verbal sign which expresses an external fact: I do not require to examine my own ideas upon the abstract terms in the abstract relation which the proposition sets forth. But for the original attainment of these ideas I had to exercise many and complex efforts of conceptual thought, without the previous occurrence of which I should not now have been able to use, with full understanding of its import, this verbal sign. Thus all such predications, however habitual and mechanical they may become, must at some time have required the mind to examine the ideas which they announce. And, similarly, all acts of such mental examination—i.e. all acts of introspection,—however superfluous they may now appear when their known product is used for further acts of mental examination, must originally have required the mind to pause before them and make to itself a definite statement or predication of their meaning.[140]
But although I hold this to be the true explanation of the apparent independence of predication and introspection in all cases of highly abstract thought, I am firmly convinced that in all cases where those lower orders of ideation to which I have so often referred as receptual and pre-conceptual are concerned, the independence is not only apparent, but real. This, indeed, I have already proved must be the case with the pre-conceptual propositions of a young child, inasmuch as such propositions are then made in the absence of self-consciousness, or of the necessary condition to their being in any degree introspective. But the point now is, that even in the adult human mind non-conceptual predication is habitual, and that, in cases where only receptual ideation is concerned, predication of this kind need never have been conceptual. For, as Mill very truly says, “it will be admitted that, by asserting the proposition, we wish to communicate information of that physical fact (namely, that the summit of Chimborazo is white), and are not thinking of the names, except as the necessary means of making that communication. The meaning of the proposition, therefore, is that the individual thing denoted by the subject has the attributes connoted by the predicate.”[141]
Now, if it is thus true that even in ordinary predication we may not require to take conceptual cognizance of the matter predicated—having to do only with the apposition of names immediately suggested by association,—the ideation concerned becomes so closely affiliated with that which is expressed in the lower levels of sign-making, that even if the connecting links were not supplied by the growing child, no one would be justified, on psychological grounds alone, in alleging any difference of kind between one level and another. The object of all sign-making is primarily that of communication, and from our study of the lower animals we know that communication first has to do exclusively with recepts, while from our study of the growing child we know that it is the signs used in the communication of recepts which first lead to the formation of concepts. For concepts are first of all named recepts, known as such; and we have seen in previous chapters that this kind of knowledge (i.e. of names as names) is rendered possible by introspection, which, in turn is reached by the naming of self as an agent. But even after the power of conceptual introspection has been fully reached, demand is not always made upon it for the communication of merely receptual knowledge; and therefore it is that not every proposition requires to be introspectively contemplated as such before it can be made. Given the power of denotative nomination on the one hand, and the power of even the lowest degree of connotative nomination on the other, and all the conditions are furnished to the formation of non-conceptual statements, which differ from true propositions only in that they do not themselves become objects of thought. And the only difference between such a statement when made by a young child, and the same statement when similarly made by a grown man, is that in the former case it is not even potentially capable of itself becoming an object of thought.
Here, then, the psychological examination of my opponents’ position comes to an end. And, in the result, I claim to have shown that in whatever way we regard the distinctively human faculty of conceptual predication, it is proved to be but a higher development of that faculty of receptual communication, the ascending degrees of which admit of being traced through the brute creation up to the level which they attain in a child during the first part of its second year,—after which they continue to advance uninterruptedly through the still higher receptual life of the child, until by further though not less imperceptible growth they pass into the incipiently conceptual life of a human mind—which, nevertheless, is not even then nearly so far removed from the intelligence of the lower animals, as it is from that which in the course of its own subsequent evolution it is eventually destined to become.
CHAPTER XII.
COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY.