Mental Evolution in Man 26
I will now sum up these sundry definitions.
By an _indicative_ sign I will understand a significant tone or
gesture intentionally expressive of a mental state; but yet not in any
sense of the word denominative.
By a _denotative_ sign I will understand the receptual marking of
particular objects, qualities, actions, &c.
By a _connotative_ sign I will understand the classificatory
attribution of qualities to objects named by the sign, whether such
attribution be due to receptual or to conceptual operations of the mind.
By a _denominative_ sign I will understand a connotative sign
consciously bestowed as such, or with a full conceptual appreciation of
its office and purpose as a name.
By a _predicative_ sign I will mean a proposition, or the conceptual
apposition of two denominative terms, expressive of the speaker’s
intention to connote something of the one by means of the other.
CHAPTER IX.
SPEECH.
We are now coming to close quarters with our subject. All the
foregoing chapters have been arranged with a view to preparing the
way for what is hereafter to follow; and, therefore, as already
remarked, I have thus far presented material over which I do not
think it is possible that any dispute can arise. But now we come to
that particular exhibition of the sign-making faculty which not only
appears to be peculiar to man, but which obviously presents so great
an advance upon all the lower phases hitherto considered, that it is
the place where my opponents have chosen to take their stand. When a
man maintains that there is a difference of kind between animal and
human intelligence, he naturally feels himself under some obligation
to indicate the point where this difference obtains. To say that it
obtains with the appearance of language, in the sense of sign-making,
is obviously too wide a statement; for, as we have now so fully seen,
language, in this widest sense, demonstrably obtains among the lower
animals. Consequently, the line must be drawn, not at language or
sign-making, but at that particular kind of sign-making which we
understand by Speech. Now the distinctive peculiarity of this kind of
sign-making—and one, therefore, which does not occur in any other
kind—consists in predication, or the using of signs as movable
types for the purpose of making propositions. It does not signify
whether or not the signs thus used are words. The gestures of Indians
and deaf-mutes admit, as we have seen, of being wrought up into a
machinery of predication which, for all purposes of practical life,
is almost as efficient as speech. The distinction, therefore, resides
in the intellectual powers; not in the symbols thereof. So that a
man _means_, it matters not by what system of signs he expresses his
meaning: the distinction between him and the brute consists in his
being able to _mean a proposition_. Now, the kind of mental act whereby
a man is thus enabled to mean a proposition is called by psychologists
an act of Judgment. Predication, or the making of a proposition, is
nothing more nor less than the __EXPRESSION__ of a judgment; and a judgment
is nothing more nor less than the apprehension of whatever meaning it
may be that a proposition serves to set forth. Therefore, it belongs to
the very essence of predication that it should involve a judgment; and
it belongs to the very essence of a judgment that it should admit of
being stated in the form of a proposition.[93]
Lastly, just as this is the place where my opponents take a stand,
so, as they freely allow, it is the only place where they _can_ take
a stand. If once this chasm of speech were bridged, there would be
no further chasm to cross. From the simplest judgment which it is
possible to make, and therefore from the simplest proposition which
it is possible to construct, it is on all hands admitted that human
intelligence displays an otherwise uniform or uninterrupted ascent
through all the grades of excellence which it afterwards presents.
Here, then, and here alone, we have what Professor Max Müller calls
the Rubicon of Mind, which separates the brute from the man, and over
which, it is alleged, the army of Science can never hope to pass.
In order to present the full difficulty which is here encountered, I
will allow it to be stated by the ablest of my opponents. As President
of the Biological Section of the British Association in 1879, Mr.
Mivart expressed his matured thought upon the subject thus:—
“The simplest element of thought seems to me to be a ‘judgment,’
with intuition of reality concerning some ‘fact,’ regarded as a fact
real or ideal. Moreover, this judgment is not itself a modified
imagination, because the imaginations which may give occasion to it
persist unmodified in the mind side by side with the judgment they
have called up. Let us take, as examples, the judgments, ‘That thing
is good to eat,’ and ‘Nothing can be and not be at the same time and
in the same sense.’ As to the former, we vaguely imagine ‘things good
to eat;’ but they must exist _beside_ the judgment, not _in_ it. They
can be recalled, compared, and seen to co-exist. So with the other
judgment, the mind is occupied with certain abstract ideas, though the
imagination has certain vague ‘images’ answering respectively to ‘a
thing being,’ and ‘a thing not being,’ and to ‘at the same time’ and
‘in the same sense;’ but the images do not _constitute_ the judgment
itself, any more than human ‘swimming’ is made up of limbs and fluid,
though without such necessary elements no such swimming could take
place.[94]
“This distinction is also shown by the fact that one and the same idea
may be suggested to, and maintained in, the mind by the help of the
most incongruous images, and very different ideas by the very same
image; this we may see to be the case with such ideas as ‘number,’
‘purpose,’ ‘motion,’ ‘identity,’ &c.
“But the distinctness of ‘thought’ from ‘imagination’ may perhaps
be made clearer by the drawing out fully what we really do when we
make some simple judgment, as, _e.g._, ‘A negro is black.’ Here, in
the first place, we directly and explicitly affirm that there is a
conformity between the external thing, ‘a negro,’ and the external
quality ‘blackness’—the negro possessing that quality. We affirm,
secondarily and implicitly, a conformity between two external entities
and two corresponding internal concepts. And thirdly, and lastly,
we also implicitly affirm the existence of a conformity between the
subjective judgment and the objective existence.”[95]
I will next allow this matter to be presented in the words of another
adversary, and one whom Mr. Mivart approvingly quotes.
“The question is, Can the sense say anything—make a judgment at all?
Can it furnish the blank formula of a judgment—the ‘is’ in ‘A is B’?
The grass of the battlefield was green, and the sense gave both the
grass and the greenness; but did it affirm that ‘the grass is green’?
It may be assumed that ‘grass’ and ‘green’ together form one complex
object, which is an object under space and time, and therefore of
sense. But against this the rejoinder at once is, that the sense may
indeed take in and report (so to speak) a complex object, but that in
this case the question is, not about the complex object, but about the
_complexity_ of the object. It is one thing to see green grass, and
evidently quite another to affirm the _greenness_ of the grass. The
difference is all the difference between seeing two things united,
and seeing them _as united_.... If a brute could think ‘is,’ brute
and man would be brothers. ‘Is,’ as the copula of a judgment, implies
the mental separation, and recombination of two terms that only exist
united in nature, and can therefore never have impressed the sense
except as one thing.[96] And ‘is,’ considered as a substantive verb, as
in the example ‘This man is,’ contains in itself the application of the
copula of judgment to the most elementary of all abstractions—‘thing’
or ‘something.’ Yet if a being has the power of thinking—‘thing,’ it
has the power of transcending space and time by dividing or decomposing
the phenomenally one. Here is the point where instinct ends and reason
begins.”[97]
It would be easy to add quotations from other writers to the same
effect as the above;[98] but these may be held sufficient to give
material for the first stage of my criticism, which is of a purely
technical character. I affirm that all writers who thus take their
stand upon the distinctively human faculty of predication are
taking their stand at the wrong place. In other words, without at
present disputing whether we have to do with a distinction of kind
or of degree, I say, and say confidently, that the distinction in
question—_i.e._ between animal and human intelligence—may be easily
proved to occur further back than at the faculty of predication, or
the forming of a proposition. The distinction occurs at the faculty of
denomination, or the bestowing of a name, known as such. “The simplest
element of thought” is _not_ a “_judgment_:” the simplest element of
thought is a _concept_. That this is the case admits of being easily
demonstrated in several different ways.
In the first place, it is evident that there could be no judgments
without concepts, just as there could be no propositions without terms.
A judgment is the result of a comparison of concepts, and this is the
reason why it can only find __EXPRESSION__ in a proposition, which sets
forth the relation between the concepts by bringing into apposition
their corresponding terms. Judgments, therefore, are _compounds_ of
thought: the _elements_ are concepts.
In the second place, given the power of conceiving, and the germ of
judgment is implied, though not expanded into the blossom of formal
predication. For whenever we bestow a name we are implicitly judging
that the thing to which we apply the name presents the attributes
connoted by that name, and thus we are virtually predicating the fact.
For example, when I call a man a “Negro,” the very term itself affirms
blackness as the distinctive quality of that individual—just as does
the equivalent nursery term, “Black-man.” To utter the name Negro,
therefore, or the name Black-man, is to form and pronounce at least
two judgments touching an individual object of sensuous perception—to
wit, that it is a man, and that he is black. The judgments so formed
and pronounced are doubtless not so explicit as is the case when both
subject and predicate are associated in the full proposition—“A negro
is black;” but in the single term Negro, or Black-man, both these
elements were already present, and _must_ have been so if the name were
in any degree at all conceptual—_i.e._ _denominative_ as distinguished
from _denotative_. In the illustration “Negro,” or “Black-man,” it so
happens that the connotation of the name is directly given by the
etymology of the name; but this circumstance is immaterial. Whether or
not the etymology of a connotative name happens to fit the particular
subject to which it is applied, the same kind of classificatory
judgment is required for any appropriate application of the same. If,
with Blumenbach, I am accustomed to call a negro an Ethiopian, when I
apply this name to any representative of that race, I am performing
the same mental act as my neighbour who calls him a Negro, or my child
who calls him a Black-man. If it should be said that in all such
cases the act of naming is so immediately due to association that no demand is made upon the powers of judgment, the admission would be a dangerous one for my opponents to make, since the same remark would apply to the full proposition, “That man is black.”
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