Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/531

Rh both; Surely if a sound is used for the purpose of marking resemblances and attributing qualities, it is a genuine name, and the mental process underlying it is a germ of true conceptual thought. To say that the parrot attributes qualities, and attributes them in a "classificatory" way too, seems indeed to mean that the bird has got a considerable way along the conceptual path, and is fairly within sight of our distinctions of thing and quality, individual and class. Why logical reflection on this name as such should be needed to raise such a performance to the dignity of a true conceptual act, one is at a loss to understand. And, indeed, the author himself appears to recognize all this in a dim way at least, when he adds that the connotative sign may be the accompaniment not only of receptual but of truly conceptual ideation. At the same time this addition may very well complete the reader's perplexity, for it appears to render the next stage of evolution, the denominative sign, unnecessary.

Altogether the author's account of sign-accompanied ideation is not quite satisfactory. To begin with, one misses an adequate psychological treatment of signs in general, their nature and function in our mental processes, such as M. Taine has given us in the beginning of his work On Intelligence. Then our author has left us very much in the dark as to what it is that the sign does for the intellective process, when it begins to be used. On the one hand, since we are told that the mere addition of a name transforms the generic image into a "concept," we naturally expect the function of the sign to be a large and important one. On the other hand, we gather that signs can be used at the level of receptual ideation, where, consequently, true conceptual thought is wholly excluded.

This confusion seems to have its main source in the curious theory that while an idea may be general, it can not become a true concept till it is introspectively regarded as our idea; and its counterpart, that while a sign may be a true sign and even subserve the attribution of qualities to objects, it can not grow into the full stature of a name till it is reflected on as a name. By this doctrine Dr. Romanes seems unwittingly to have substituted the logical for the psychological definition of the concept, and so to have put the latter higher up in the evolutional scale than it ought to be. To this it must be added that the author appears to have been overanxious, with the view of making the transit smooth, to multiply distinctions. Such intermediate forms as Dr. Romanes here attempts to interpolate in the process of intellectual development can not in truth do away with the broad distinctions which psychologists are in the habit of drawing. Thus the recept only appears to connect the image and the concept just because it tries to be both at the same time. So the lower stadium