Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/527

Rh because the animal is unable to note differences sufficiently to distinguish one sheet of water or one man from another. A baby's application of the common epithet "dada" to all bearded persons suggests not that it is carrying out any process of conscious generalization, but rather that it is failing to discriminate where there are striking and interesting features of similarity. It would seem as if an idea only acquires a properly general function after certain higher intellectual processes have been carried out. These may be roughly described as the active manipulation of percepts and images, by analytical resolution of these into their constituent features, and a due relating or ordering of these elements. Only in this way does it appear possible to reach a rudimentary form of a properly general notion; that is to say, an idea which is consciously apprehended as representing common features among a number of distinct objects. Mere superposition of images may result in a new typical image; but the mind in which such an image forms itself can not know this to be generic or general till these processes which underlie active thought have been carried out. Now, we ourselves carry out these operations of resolving into elements and recombining these elements (analysis and synthesis) largely by the help of class-symbols or general names, which come to be general symbols just because we make use of them for the purpose of noting down and keeping distinct the results of our successive comparisons and analyses. And the really pressing question for the evolutional psychologist is. How does this manipulation of the mind's imagery get carried out where the serviceable instrument of language is absent? That it does get carried out to some extent may be readily allowed. A sagacious and well-bred collie, who combines with a judicious preference for his owner a certain mild complacency toward mankind at large (with some possible exceptions), may be rightly regarded as having attained to a rudimentary consciousness of the distinction between the general and the particular, the "class" and its constituent members. But how this has been attained Dr. Romanes's account of receptual ideation hardly helps us to understand.

The recept or generic image is the first of the psychological stepping-stones leading across the unfordable Rubicon, and it is also the principal stepping-stone. Should this prove to be unstable, the transit would certainly become exceedingly doubtful.

From the recept we pass to the concept, which, according to our author, is in its simplest form a named recept. The addition of the name or sign is thus the differentiating character of the concept. We may have generic images, but no concepts apart from names or other signs.

In order to understand how the concept is marked off from