Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/530

512 or action; it does not extend the sign to any other similar objects, qualities, or actions of the same class; and therefore by its use of that sign does not really connote anything of the particular object, quality, or action which it denotes. Next in order (c) follow connotative signs which involve the "classificatory attribution of qualities to objects." This attribution of qualities may be effected either by a receptual or a properly conceptual mode of ideation. For example, a parrot had come to use a barking sound when a particular dog appeared on the scene. This sign was afterward extended to other dogs, showing that there was a certain recognition of the common qualities or attributes of the dog. Similarly when the writer's own child, among its first words, used the term star for all brightly shining objects. Here again there was perception of likeness, but no setting the term before its mind as an object of thought. Lastly (d), we have the denominative sign which means a connotative sign consciously bestowed as such with a full conceptual appreciation of its office and purpose as a name.

In this scheme Dr. Romanes evidently recognizes the point we are now dealing with, viz., the implication of a true thought-process in the proper use of a name. He seems to be trying to dispense with this as long as possible, with the view of securing a number of intermediate stepping-stones. Can he be said to have succeeded? Does this hierarchy of signs with its parallel scale of ideation carry us up to logical thought? Is it even intelligible? Let us briefly examine it.

To begin with, it staggers one not a little to find that long before the "classificatory attribution of qualities" is possible, the animal somehow manages to mark "particular qualities," whatever these may mean. How, one asks, can a sign be appended to a quality without becoming a "connotative sign"—that is, attributing a quality to a thing? But let us pass to the really important point, viz., the alleged power of the animal, e. g., the talking bird, to extend a sign to different members of a class, and so to attribute common qualities or resemblances to these, while it is unable to form a concept in the full sense. This extension, we are told, takes place in the case of the sign-using bird by receptual ideation. And here the critic may as well confess himself fairly beaten. On the one hand, Dr. Romanes tells us that such a named recept is a concept (lower concept), and, moreover, that the sign employed is a connotative sign; on the other hand, he hastens to assure us that it is not a name, and therefore presumably not a concept, in the rigorous or perfect sense, since the sign is not consciously employed as a sign. Here we seem to have a steppingstone which it is impossible to define, a sort of tertium quid between the image and the concept which is at once neither and