Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/526

508 achievements, and on the other hand to trace the process of human intellection down to its crudest forms in the individual and in the race.

As it is obviously language which marks off human thought from its analogue in the animal world, our author is naturally concerned to limit the function of language. While allowing as a matter of course that the "conceptual thought" of the logician involves language as its proper instrument or vehicle, he urges that there is a good deal of rudimentary generalizing prior to, and therefore independent of, language. To establish this a careful examination of the higher processes of animal "ideation" has to be carried out. In doing this Dr. Romanes introduces a number of psychological distinctions of a somewhat technical kind. Of these the most important perhaps is that between the time-honored concept of the logician and the recept. This last corresponds to Mr. Galton's generic image or the common image (Gemeinbild) of the German psychologists. It is an image formed out of a number of slightly dissimilar percepts corresponding to different members of a narrow concrete class, such as dog or water. According to our author, animal reasoning remains on the plane of recepts. It is carried on by pictorial representations. At the same time it involves a process of classification or generalizing. A diving-bird must be supposed to have a generalized idea (recept) of water, a dog a generalized idea of man, and so forth. Nay, more, this receptual ideation enables the animal to reach "unperceived abstractions," as the idea of the quality of hollowness in the ground, and even "generic ideas of principles" as when the writer's own monkey having discovered the way to take the handle out of the hearth-brush by unscrewing it, proceeded to apply the principle of the screw to the fire-irons, bell-handle, etc.

The author's whole account of this receptual ideation or the logic of recepts is interesting and persuasive. He has, it must be owned, clearly made out the existence of a very creditable power among animals of carrying out processes analogous to our own reasonings without any aid from language. Yet a doubt may be entertained whether the author has really got at the bottom of these mental feats. The whole account of the recept is a little unsatisfactory, owing to the circumstance that the writer does not make it quite clear in what sense it involves generalization. He writes in some places as if the fact of the generic image having been formed out of a number of percepts corresponding to different members of a class, e. g., different sheets of water seen by the diving-bird, gives it a general representative character. But this, as indeed Dr. Romanes himself appears to recognize in other places, is by no means a necessary consequence. A generic image may form itself more readily than a particular one, just