Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty

by George John Romanes

Now, we have already seen that pre-conceptual connotation amounts to what I have termed pre-conceptual judgment. The qualities or relations thus connotated are not indeed contemplated as qualities or as relations; but in the mere act of such a connotative classification the higher receptual intelligence is virtually judging a resemblance, and virtually predicating its judgment. Therefore I think it probable that the earliest forms of such virtual predication were those which would have been conveyed in single words. And, as we have seen in the foregoing chapters, there is abundant and wholly independent evidence to show, that this form of nascent predication continued to hold an important place until so late in the intellectual history of our race as to leave a permanent record of its occurrence in the structure of all languages now extant.

The epoch during which these sentence-words prevailed was probably immense; and, as we have before seen, far from having been inimical to gesticulation, must have greatly encouraged it—raising, in fact, the indicative phase of language to the level of elaborate pantomime. Out of the complex of sentence-words and gesture-signs thus inaugurated, grammatical forms became slowly evolved, as we know from the independent witness of philology. But long before grammatical forms of any sort began to be evolved, a kind of uncertain differentiation must have taken place in this protoplasmic material of speech, in such wise that some sentence-words would have tended to become specially denotative of particular objects, others of particular actions, states, qualities, and relations. This “primitive streak,” as it were, of what was afterwards to constitute the vertebral column of articulated language in the independent yet mutually related “parts of speech,” must in large measure have owed its development to gesture. Now, by this time, gesture itself must already have acquired an elementary kind of syntax, such as belongs even to semiotic movements of an infant who happens to be late in beginning to speak.[332] This elementary kind of syntax would necessarily be taken over by, or impressed upon, the growing structure of speech, at all events so far as the principles and the order of apposition were concerned. Moreover, this sign-making value of apposition would at the same time have been promoted within the sphere of articulate signs themselves. For, as we have previously seen, as soon as words become in any measure denotative, they immediately begin to undergo a connotative extension;[333] and with this progressive widening of signification, words require to be more and more frequently used in apposition. Quite independently of any as yet non-existing powers of introspective thought, the external “logic of events” must have constantly determined such apposition of receptually connotative terms, as we have already so fully seen in the case of the growing child. Thus the conditions were laid for the tripartite division—the genitive case, the adjective, and the verb. Not till long subsequent ages, however, would this division have taken place in its fulness. During the time which we are now contemplating, there could have been no distinction at all between the genitive case and the adjective; neither could there have been any verbs as independent parts of speech. Nevertheless, already some of the denotative signs would have been used as names of particular objects, others of particular qualities, and yet others of particular actions, states, and relations. Not yet deserving to be regarded as fully differentiated parts of speech, these object-words, quality-words, &c., would have resembled those with which we are all well acquainted in nursery language, and which still survive, in a remarkably large measure, among many dialects of a low order of development. Now, as soon as these denotative names became at all fixed in meaning within the limits of the same community, those which respectively signified objects, qualities, actions, states, and relations, must necessarily have been often used in apposition; and, as often as they were thus used, would have constituted nascent or pre-conceptual propositions.

The probability certainly is that immense intervals of time would have been consumed in the passage through these various grades of mental evolution; but when we remember the great importance of this kind of evolution to the species which had once begun to travel in that direction, we cannot wonder that survival of the fittest should have placed a high premium upon the instrument of its attainment—or, in other words, that the faculty of sign-making, when once happily started, should have been successively pushed onwards through ascending grades of efficiency, so that it should soon become as unique in the mammalian series as, for analogous reasons, are the flying powers of the Chiroptera. But however long or however short the time may have been that was required for our early progenitors to pass from one of these stages of sign-making to another, so soon as the denotative name of an object was brought into apposition with the denotative name of a quality or an action, so soon was there uttered the virtual statement of a virtual judgment, even though the mind which formed it was very far indeed from being able either to think about its judgment as a judgment, or to state a truth as true.

Thus we perceive that two different principles were presumably concerned in the genesis of what I have called pre-conceptual predication. The first consists in the natural and inevitable extension of denotative into connotative terms, through the force of merely receptual association. The second consists in the no less natural and inevitable apposition of denotative terms themselves, whereby a receptually perceived relation is virtually—though not conceptually—predicated as subsisting between the objects, qualities, states, actions, or relations which are denoted. Of course it is evident that these two modes of development must have mutually assisted one another: the more that denotative signs underwent connotative extension, the greater must have been their predicative value when used in apposition; and the more frequently denotative signs were used in apposition, the greater must have become the extension of their connotative value.

Lastly, it is desirable throughout all this hypothetical discussion to remember that we have the positive evidence of philology touching two points of considerable importance. The first point is that, as in the aboriginal sentence-words there was no differentiation of, or distinction between, subject and predicate; so, until very late in the evolution of predicative utterance, there was—and in very many languages still continues to be—an absence of the copula. Nay, even the substantive verb, which has been unwittingly confounded with the copula by some of my opponents, was also very late in making its appearance.

The second point is that, although “pronominal elements”—or verbal equivalents of gesture-signs indicative of space-relations—were among the earliest of verbal differentiations, it was not until after æons of ages had elapsed that any pronouns arose as specially indicative of the first person.[334] Now, this point I consider one of prime importance. For it furnishes us with direct evidence of the fact that, long after mankind had begun to speak, and even long after they had gained considerable proficiency in the art of articulate language, the speakers still continued to refer to themselves in that same kind of objective phraseology as is employed by a child before the dawn of self-consciousness. This, of course, is what on antecedent or theoretical grounds we should infer must have been the case; but it is surely a matter of great moment that our inference on this point should admit of such full and independent verification at the hands of philological research. As we have now so repeatedly seen, the distinction between ideas as receptual and conceptual turns upon the presence or absence of self-consciousness, in the full or introspective signification of that term. And, as we have likewise seen, the outward and visible sign of this inward and spiritual grace is given in the subjective use of pronominal words. But if these things admit of no question in the case of an individual human mind—if in the case of the growing child the rise of self-consciousness is demonstrably the condition to that of conceptual thought,—by what feat of logic can it be possible to insinuate that in the growing psychology of the race there may have been conceptual thought before there was any true self-consciousness? Obviously this cannot be insinuated without denying those identical principles of psychology on which my opponents themselves rely. Will it, then, be said that the criterion of self-consciousness which is valid for a child is not valid for the race—that although in the former the rise of self-consciousness is marked by the change from objective to subjective phraseology, in the latter a precisely similar change is not to be accredited with a similar meaning? If this were to be suggested, it would not merely be quite gratuitous as a suggestion, but directly opposed to the whole of an otherwise perfectly parallel analogy. In point of fact, then, there is obviously no escape from the conclusion that in the race, as in the individual, the development of true, or “inward,” from receptual, or “outward,” self-consciousness was a gradual process; that its birth in the former is not merely a matter of inference—overpowering though this inference be,—but a matter of actual fact which is recorded in the archives of Language itself; and, therefore, that the central question upon which the whole of the present treatise has been engaged cannot any longer be regarded as an open question. It has been closed, part by part, as the witness of philology has verified, stage by stage, the results of our psychological analysis; and now, eventually, the verification has extended to the central core of the matter, revealing in all its naked simplicity the one decisive fact, that in the childhood of the world, no less than in that of the man, we may see the fundamental change from sense to thought: in the one as in the other do we behold that—

“As he grows he gathers much,

And learns the use of ‘I,’ and ‘me,’
And finds ‘I am not what I see,

And other than the things I touch.’