Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/528

510 the recept, we must accordingly inquire into fhe psychological conditions and concomitants of the naming process. And this our author does at some length. He gives us a full and detailed account of names and of signs in general, distinguishing different grades of sign-making from the merely indicative pointing or other gesture up to the bestowal of a general symbol with a consciousness of its significance as connoting certain common qualities. Into much of this it is not needful for us to follow Dr. Romanes, but brief reference may be made to one or two points of special importance as bearing on the evolution of the higher conceptual thought. One of the most curious features of Dr. Romanes's theory of concepts and naming is the proposition that the name is bestowed on the idea, and has for its psychological condition an act of introspection. He tells us that before we can bestow a name on a recept we must be able to set this recept before our mind as an object of our own thought. Or, to express the truth in the author's own words, self-consciousness is the necessary presupposition of naming and so of conceptual thought. Before I can name an idea I must reflect on the idea as mine, and before I can judge in the logical sense, I must realize the truth of the proposition as such, that is presumably as truth for me, so that self-consciousness would seem to come in necessarily at all stages of conceptual thought.

This doctrine seems by no means as clear and convincing as the author supposes. He is, as he clearly tells us, confining himself to the psychological treatment of his subject. This being so, it may fairly be urged that in making an act of subjective introspection an essential factor in the process of naming he is psychologically wrong. Is a child when inventing a name for his toy horse or doll reflecting on his idea as his and naming this idea? Is he not rather thinking wholly about the object, and is not the name given to this external object and not to the idea in the namer's mind at all? No doubt the completed process of logical reflection on names and propositions brings in the subjective element—that is to say the mind's consciousness of its ideas and judgments as representations of the realities thought about. But this reference to self, this act of introspection, so far from being involved in every act of conceptual thought, is directly excluded from it.

This brings one to the next point. In naming things the mind is busily occupied, not with itself and its ideas, but with the "not-self," the qualities and relations of the things perceived or