SECTION I. CONCEPT OF NUMBER.

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THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY

324 DEARBORN ST., CHICAGO, ILL.

LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & COMPANY

THE EVOLUTION

OF

GENERAL IDEAS

BY

TH. RIBOT

PROFESSOR IN THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCE

AUTHORISED TRANSLATION FROM THE FRENCH

BY

FRANCES A. WELBY

CHICAGO

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY

LONDON: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., LTD.

1899

COPYRIGHT BY

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.

CHICAGO, U. S. A.

1899

_All rights reserved._

PREFACE.

The principal aim of this work is to study the development of the mind

as it abstracts and generalises, and to show that these two operations

exhibit a perfect evolution: that is to say, they exist already in

perception, and advance by successive and easily determined stages to the

more elevated forms of pure symbolism, accessible only to the minority.

It is a commonplace to say that abstraction has its degrees, as number

its powers. Yet it is not sufficient to enunciate this truism; the

degrees must be fixed by clear, objective signs, and these must not be

arbitrary. Thus we shall obtain precise knowledge of the various stages

in this ascending evolution, and stand in less danger of confounding

abstractions highly distinct by nature. Moreover, we avoid certain

equivocal questions and discussions that are based entirely upon the very

extended sense of the terms to _abstract_ and to _generalise_.

Accordingly we have sought to establish three main periods in the

progressive development of these operations: (1) inferior abstraction,

prior to the appearance of speech, independent of words (though not of

all signs); (2) intermediate abstraction, accompanied by words, which

though at first accessory, increase in importance little by little; (3)

superior abstraction, where words alone exist in consciousness, and

correspond to a complete substitution.[1]

These three periods again include subdivisions, transitional forms which

we shall endeavor to determine.

This is a study of pure psychology, from which we have rigorously to

eliminate all that relates to logic, to the theory of knowledge, to first

principles of philosophy. We are concerned with genesis, with embryology,

with evolution only. We are thus thrown upon observation, upon the facts

wherein mental processes are enunciated, and discovered. Our material,

and principal sources of information, lie therefore: (1) for inferior

abstracts, in the acts of animals, of children, of uneducated deaf-mutes;

(2) for intermediate abstracts, in the development of languages, and the

ethnographical documents of primitive or half-civilised peoples; (3) for

superior abstracts, in the progressive constitution of scientific ideas

and theories, and of classifications.

This volume is a _résumé_ of lectures given at the Collège de France in

1895. It is the first of a forthcoming series, designed to include all

departments of psychology: the unconscious, percepts, images, volition,

movement, etc.

TH. RIBOT.

March, 1897.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PAGE

CHAPTER I.

THE LOWER FORMS OF ABSTRACTION.—ABSTRACTION PRIOR TO SPEECH.

Two forms of intellectual activity: association and

dissociation.—Abstraction belongs to the second type. Its

positive and negative conditions. It is a case of attention:

psychical reinforcement.—It is in embryo in concrete

operations: in perception, and the image. Its practical

character.—Generalisation belongs to the first type. Problem of

the _primum cognitum_; difference or resemblance?—Hierarchy of

general ideas: need of a notation. Three great classes.—Lower

forms of abstraction and generalisation or pre-linguistic

period, characterised by absence of words 1

ANIMALS.

Different observations. Numeration in animals; what does it

consist of?—Mode of formation and characteristics of generic

images. Reasoning in animals.—Reasoning from particular to

particular: how this differs from simple association.—Reasoning

by analogy.—The logic of images: its two degrees; its

characteristics. Does not admit of substitution; always has a

practical aim.—Discussion of certain cases 11

CHILDREN.

Does intelligence start from the general or the particular?

A badly-stated question. Intelligence proceeds from the

indefinite to the definite.—Characteristics of generic

images in children; examples.—Numeration; its narrow limits.

Difference between real numeration and perception of a

plurality 31

DEAF-MUTES.

These furnish the upper limit of the logic of images.—Their

natural language. Vocabulary. All their signs are abstractions.

Syntax of position; disposition of terms according to order of

importance.—Intellectual level 39

ANALYTICAL GESTURES.

General classification of signs.—Gesture, an intellectual,

not an emotional, instrument; its wide distribution. Syntax

identical with that of deaf-mutes.—Comparison between phonetic

language and language of analytical gesture.—Reason why speech

has prevailed 48

CHAPTER II.

SPEECH.

Language in animals.—The origin of speech; principal

contemporaneous hypotheses; instinct, progressive evolution.

The cry, vocalisation, articulation. Transitional forms:

co-existence of speech and of the language of action;

co-existence of speech and of inarticulate sounds.—The

development of speech. Protoplasmic period without

grammatical functions.—Roots; two theories: reality, and

residue of analysis.—Did speech begin with words or with

phrases?—Successive appearance of parts of speech. Adjectives

or denominations of qualities. The substantive a contraction

of the adjective. Verbs not a primitive phenomenon; the

three degrees of abstraction.—Terms expressive of relations.

Psychological nature of relation, may be reduced to change or

movement. Function of analogy 54

CHAPTER III.

INTERMEDIATE FORMS OF ABSTRACTION.

Division into two classes according to the function of the

word.—First class. Words not indispensable, and only in a

limited degree the instrument of substitution.—Difference

between generic images and lower concepts. Characteristics of

these two classes. Is there continuity between the two? Nature

of the lower forms of intermediate abstraction, according to

languages, numeration, etc. Concrete-abstract period.—Second

class. Words are indispensable and become an instrument of

substitution.—Difficulty in finding examples.—History of

zoölogical classification: pre-scientific period: Aristotle,

Linnæus, Cuvier, etc., contemporary writers. Progress towards

unity 86

CHAPTER IV.

HIGHER FORMS OF ABSTRACTION. THEIR NATURE.

Object of the chapter: What is there in consciousness, when we

think by concepts?—The general idea as a psychical state may be

reduced to varieties. Investigation of this point: the method

pursued.—Reduction to three principal types. Concrete type the

most widely distributed. Variation; reply by association of

ideas. Visual typographic type: printed words seen and nothing

further.—Auditory type; less common.—Interrogations by general

propositions: same results. Investigation of cases in which

words exist alone in consciousness. Is it possible to think

with words only? Rôle of unconscious knowledge. General ideas

are intellectual habits.—Natural antagonism between the image

and the concept. Its causes.—Are there general ideas or merely

general terms? 111

CHAPTER V.

EVOLUTION OF THE PRINCIPAL CONCEPTS.

_Section I.—The Concept of Number._

Return to lower phases: concrete and abstract.—Formation of

idea of unity. Hypotheses as to its experimental origin: touch,

sight, hearing, internal sensations, attention. Unity the

result of decomposition, an abstract.—The series of numbers.

Process of construction.—Function of signs: discussions of this

subject 137

_Section II.—The Concept of Space._

Extension as a concrete fact. Variable and relative

characteristics.—Transition to concrete-abstract period.—Space

(abstract): the current popular conception the result of

imagination. Idle problems.—The true concept is the result

of dissociation.—The notion of “function.”—Imagination of an

infinite space.—Works on ideal geometry: constructive power

of the mind; reinforcement of distinction between space as

perceived and conceived 146

_Section III.—The Concept of Time._

Real (concrete) duration: the present, its reality; its

experimental determination: maximum and minimum. Reproduction

of duration; experiments; indifferent point.—Variable and

relative characteristics.—Origin of concrete notion of time:

different hypotheses: external and internal sensations:

presumption in favor of the latter.—Abstract duration

(time). First stage, depends on memory and imagination only:

corresponds (1) to generic images (representation of duration

among the higher animals), and (2) to the concrete-abstract

period (intermediate forms of abstraction). Primitive races.

Why has time (and not space) been personified.—Second stage

depends upon abstraction. Function of the astronomers:

measure of time.—Infinite time.—Current hypotheses as to the

psychologic process which constitutes the notion of time:

sensations and consecutive images: sensations which are

feelings of tension, of effort. “Temporal signs.”—Full and

empty time 159

_Section IV.—The Concept of Cause._

Psychical elements constituting the concept.—Experiential

origin of the idea of cause: different solutions have all

a common basis.—Its primitive individual character. Its

extension.—Subjective and anthropomorphic period of generic

images.—Period of reflexion, partial elimination of its

subjective character, reduction to an invariable relation.—The

notion of universal causality is acquired and remains a

postulate.—Two ideas have hindered the development of this last

notion: that of miracles and that of chance.—Transformation of

the notion of cause. Rule of scientific research: its position

is exterior. Identity of cause and effect.—Present form of the

principle of universal causality.—Two quite distinct notions

of cause (force, invariable relation), one of which is alone a

concept 180

_Section V.—The Concept of Law._

Objective value of general ideas. Two contrary theories. Mere

approximations to the psychologist.—Three periods in the

development of the notion of law.—Period of generic images.

Primitive sense of the word law.—Period of empirical laws,

corresponding with the intermediate forms of abstraction.

Characteristics: identity of fact and law; complexity.—Period

of theoretical or ideal laws, corresponding to medium forms

of abstraction. Its features: simplicity, quantitative

determination, ideal formula 194

_Section VI.—The Concept of Species._

Its value: contemporaneous discussion of this subject.

Component elements of the concept of species: resemblance,

filiation. Difficulties resulting from polymorphism, from

alternate generation.—Races, varieties.—Temporary and

provisional objectivity.—Genera. Theories of Linnæus and

Agassiz.—Shifting character of the classifications above the

species.—One common point between transformists and their

opponents: practical value of concepts. Not realities, nor

fictions, but approximations.—Laws and species dependent on

conditions of existence and varying with them 203

CHAPTER VI.

CONCLUSION.

How was the faculty of abstracting and of generalising

constituted? Two principal causes: utility, appearance of

inventors.—How has it developed? Three principal directions:

practical, speculative, scientific.—_Résumé_: necessary

co-operation of two factors: the one conscious, the other

unconscious 216

CHAPTER I.

THE LOWER FORMS OF ABSTRACTION.

ABSTRACTION PRIOR TO SPEECH.

Save in extremely rare cases,—supposing such to occur at all, as

perhaps in the instant of surprise, and in states approximating to pure

sensation,—save in such extremely rare cases, where the mind, like a

mirror, passively reflects external impressions, intellectual activity

may always be reduced to one of the two following types: associating,

combining, unifying, or dissociating, isolating, and separating. These

cardinal operations underlie all forms of _cognition_, from the lowest to

the highest, and constitute its unity of composition.

Abstraction belongs to the second type. It is a normal and necessary

process of the mind, dependent on attention, i. e., on the limitation,

willed or spontaneous, of the field of consciousness. The act of

abstraction implies in its genesis both negative and positive conditions,

and is the result of these.

The negative conditions consist essentially in the fact that we cannot

apprehend more than one quality or one aspect, varying according to the

circumstances, in any complex whole,—because consciousness, like the

retina, is restricted to a narrow region of clear perception.

The positive condition is a state which has been appropriately termed a

“psychical reinforcement” of that which is being abstracted, and it is

naturally accompanied by a weakening of that which is abstracted from.

The true characteristic of abstraction is this partial increment of

intensity. While involving elimination, it is actually a positive mental

process. The elements or qualities of a percept, or a representation,

which we omit do not necessarily involve such suppression. We leave them

out of account simply because they do not suit our ends for the moment,

and are complementary.[2]

Abstraction being, then, in spite of negative appearances, a positive

operation, how are we to conceive it? Attention is necessary to it,

but it is more than attention. It is an augmentation of intensity,

but it is more than an augmentation of intensity. Suppose a group of

representations _a + b + c = d_. To abstract from _b_ and _c_ in favor

of _a_, would ostensibly give _a = d - (b + c)_. If this were so, _b_

and _c_ would be retained unaltered in consciousness; there would be no

abstraction. On the other hand, since it is impossible for the whole

representation _d_ to be suppressed outright, _b_ and _c_ cannot be

totally obliterated. They subsist, accordingly, in a residual state which

may be termed _x_, and the abstract representation is hence not _a_ but

_a + x_ or _A_. Thus the elements of abstract representations are the

same as those of concrete representations; only some are strengthened,

others weakened: whence arise new groupings. Abstraction, accordingly,

consists in the formation of new groups of representations which, while

strengthening certain elements of the concrete representations, weaken

other elements of the same.[3]

We see from the above that abstraction depends genetically upon the

causes which awaken and sustain attention. I have described these causes

elsewhere,[4] and cannot here return to their consideration.

It is sufficient to remark that abstraction, like attention, may be

instinctive, spontaneous, and natural; or reflective, voluntary, and

artificial. In the first category the abstraction of a quality or mode

of existence originates in some attraction, or from utility; hence it is

a common manifestation of intellectual life and is even met with, as we

shall see, among many of the lower animals. In its second form, the rarer

and more exalted, it proceeds less from the qualities of the object than

from the will of the subject; it presupposes a choice, an elimination, of

negligible elements, which is often laborious, as well as the difficult

task of maintaining the abstract element clearly in consciousness. In

fine, it is always a special application of the attention which, adapted

as circumstances require to observation, synthesis, action, etc., here

functions as an instrument of analysis.

A deeply-rooted prejudice asserts that abstraction is a mental act of

relative infrequency. This fallacy obtains in current parlance, where

“abstract” is a synonym of difficult, obscure, inaccessible. This is a

psychological error resulting from an incomplete view: all abstraction is

illegitimately reduced to its higher forms. The faculty of abstracting,

from the lowest to the highest degrees, is constantly the same: its

development is dependent on that of (general) intelligence and of

language; but it exists in embryo even in those primitive operations

which are properly concerned with the concrete, i. e., perception and

representation. Several recent authors have emphasised this point.[5]

Perception is _par excellence_ the faculty of cognising the concrete. It

strives to embrace all the qualities of its object without completely

succeeding, because it is held in check by an internal foe,—the natural

tendency of the mind to simplify and to eliminate. The same horse, at

a given moment, is not perceived in the same manner by a jockey, a

veterinary surgeon, a painter, and a tyro. To each of these, certain

qualities, which vary individually, stand in relief, and others recede

into the background. Except in cases of methodical and prolonged

investigation (where we have observation, and not perception) there

is always an unconscious selection of some principal characteristics

which, grouped together, become a substitute for totality. It must not

be forgotten that perception is pre-eminently a _practical_ operation,

that its mainspring is interest or utility, and that in consequence we

neglect—i. e., leave in the field of obscure consciousness—whatever at

the moment concerns neither our desires nor our purposes. It would be

superfluous to review all the forms of perception (visual, auditory,

tactile, etc.), and to show that they are governed by this same law of

utility; but it should be remarked that the natural mechanism by which

the strengthened elements and the weakened elements are separated, is a

rude cast of what subsequently becomes abstraction, that the same forces

are in play, and are ultimately reducible to some definite direction

given to the attention.

With the image, the intermediate stage between percept and concept,

the reduction of the object represented to a few fundamental features

is still more marked. Not merely is there among the different

representations which I may have of some man, dog, or tree, one that

for the time being necessarily excludes the others (my oak tree

perforce appears to me in summer foliage, tinted by autumn, or bereft

of leaves,—in bright light or in shade), but even this individual,

concrete representation which prevails over the others is no more than a

sketch, a reduction of reality with many details omitted. Apart from the

exceptionally gifted men in whom mental vision and mental audition are

perfect, and wholly commensurate (as it would seem) with perception, the

representations which we call exact are never so, except in their most

general features. Compare the image we have with our eyes closed of a

monument, with the perception of the monument itself; the remembrance of

a melody with its vocal or instrumental execution. In the average man,

the image, the would-be copy of reality invariably suffers a conspicuous

impoverishment, which is enormous in the less lavishly endowed; it is

here reduced to a mere schema, limited to the inferior concepts.

Doubtless it may be objected that the work of dissociation in perception

and representation is incomplete and partial. It would be strange and

illogical indeed if the abstract were to triumph in the very heart of

the concrete; we do but submit that it is here in germ, in embryonic

shape. And hence, when abstraction appears in its true form, as the

consciousness of one unique quality isolated from the rest, it is no new

manifestation but a fruition, it is a simplification of simplifications.

The state of consciousness thus attained, by the fixation of attention

on one quality exclusively, and by its ideal dissociation from the rest,

becomes, as we know, a notion which is neither individual nor general,

but abstract,—and this is the material of generalisation.

The sense of identity, the power of apprehending resemblances, is, as has

justly been said, “the keel and backbone of our thinking”; without it we

should be lost in the incessant stream of things.[6] Are there in nature

any complete resemblances, any absolutely similar events? It is extremely

doubtful. It might be supposed that a person who reads a sentence several

times in succession, who listens several times to the same air, who

tastes all the four quarters of the same fruit, would experience in each

case an identical perception. But this is not so. A little reflexion

will show that besides differences in time, in the varying moods of

the subject, and in the cumulative effect of repeated perceptions,

there is at least between the first perception and the second, that

radical difference which separates the new from the repeated. In fact,

the material given us by external and internal experience consists of

resemblances alloyed by differences which vary widely in degree,—in other

words, analogies. The perfect resemblance assumed between things vanishes

as we come to know them better. At first sight a new people exhibits

to the traveller a well-determined general type; later, the more he

observes, the more the apparent uniformity is resolved into varieties.

“I have taken the trouble,” says Agassiz, “to compare thousands of

individuals of the same species; in one case I pushed the comparison so

far as to have placed side by side 27,000 specimens of one and the same

shell (genus _Neretina_). I can assure you that in these 27,000 specimens

I did not find two that were perfectly alike.”

Is this faculty of grasping resemblances—the substrate of

generalization—primitive, in the absolute signification of the word?

Does it mark the first awakening of the mind, in point of cognition? For

several contemporary writers (Spencer, Bain, Schneider, and others) the

consciousness of difference is the primordial factor; the consciousness

of resemblance comes later. Others uphold the opposite contention.[7]

As a matter of fact this quest for the _primum cognitum_ is beyond

our grasp; like all genetical questions, it eludes our observation and

experience.

No conclusion can be formed save on purely logical arguments, and each

side advances reasons that carry a certain weight. There is, moreover, at

the bottom of the whole discussion, the grave error of identifying the

embryonic state of the mind with its adult forms, and of presupposing

a sharp initial distinction between discrimination and assimilation.

The question must remain open, incapable of positive solution by our

psychology. The incontestable truth with regard to the mind, as we know

it in its developed and organised state, is that the two processes

advance _pari passu_, and are reciprocally causative.

In sum, abstraction and generalisation considered as elementary acts of

the mind, and reduced to their simplest conditions, involve two processes:

1. The former, _abstraction_, implies a dissociative process, operating

on the raw data of experience. It has subjective causes which are

ultimately reducible to attention. It has objective causes which may be

due to the fact that a determinate quality is given us as an integral

part of widely different groups.

“Any total impression whose elements are never experienced apart must

be unanalysable. If all cold things were wet and all wet things cold,

if all liquids were transparent and no non-liquid were transparent,

we should scarcely discriminate between coldness and wetness and

scarcely ever invent separate names for liquidity and transparency....

What is associated now with one thing and now with another tends to

become dissociated from either, and to grow into an object of abstract

contemplation by the mind. One might call this the law of dissociation

by varying concomitants.”[8]

2. The latter, _generalisation_, originates in association by

resemblance, but even in its lowest degree it rises beyond this, since it

implies a synthetic act of fusion. It does not, in fact, consist in the

successive excitation of similar or analogous percepts, as in the case

where the image of St. Peter’s in Rome suggests to me that of St. Paul’s

in London, of the Pantheon in Paris, and of other churches with enormous

dimensions, of like architecture, and with gigantic domes. It is a

condensation. The mind resembles a crucible with a precipitate of common

resemblances at the bottom, while the differences have been volatilised.

In proportion as we recede from this primitive and elementary form, the

constitution of the general idea demands other psychological conditions

which cannot be hastily enumerated.

And thus we reach the principal aim of the present work, which purports,

not to reinforce the time-worn dispute as to the nature of abstraction

and generalisation, but to pursue these operations step by step in

their development, and multiform aspects. Directly we pass beyond

pure individual representation we reach an ascending scale of notions

which, apart from the general character possessed by all, are extremely

heterogeneous in their nature, and imply distinct mental habits. The

question so often discussed as to “What takes place in the mind when we

are thinking by general ideas?” is not to be disposed of in one definite

answer, but finds variable response according to the circumstances. In

order to give an adequate reply, the principal degrees of this scale must

first be determined. And for this we require an _objective notation_

which shall give them some external, though not arbitrary, mark.

The first distinguishing mark is given by the absence or presence

of words. Abstraction and generalisation, with no possible aid from

language, constitute the inferior group which some recent writers have

designated by the appropriate name of _generic images_[9]—a term which

clearly shows their intermediate nature between the pure image, and the

general notion, properly so-called.

The second class, which we have termed _intermediate abstraction_,

implies the use of words. At their lowest stage these concepts hardly

rise above the level of the generic image: they can be reduced to a vague

schema, in which the word is almost a superfluous accompaniment. At a

stage higher the parts are inverted: the representative schema becomes

more and more impoverished, and is obliterated by the word, which rises

in consciousness to the first rank.

Finally, the third class, that of the _higher concepts_, has for its

distinguishing mark that it can no longer be represented. If any image

arises in consciousness it does not sensibly assist the movement of

thought, and may even impede it. Everything, apparently at least, is

subordinated to language.

This enumeration of the stages of abstraction can for the present only

be given roughly and broadly. Every phase of its evolution should be

studied in itself, and accurately determined by its internal and external

characteristics. As to the legitimacy, the objective and practical value,

of this schematic distribution, nothing less than a detailed exploration

from one end to the other of our subject, can confirm or overthrow it.

We shall begin, then, with the lower forms, dwelling upon these at some

length, because they are usually neglected, or altogether omitted. This

is the _pre-linguistic_ period of abstraction and generalisation: words

are totally wanting; they are an unknown factor. How far is it possible

without the aid of language to transcend the level of perception, and

of consecutive images, and to attain a more elevated intellectual

standpoint? In replying empirically, we have three fairly copious sources

of information: animals, children who have not yet acquired speech, and

uneducated deaf-mutes.

ANIMALS.

It is a commonplace to say that animal psychology is full of obscurities

and difficulties. These arise mainly with regard to the question now

occupying us; for we are concerned with ascertaining, not whether

animals perceive, remember, and even, when their organisation is

sufficiently advanced, imagine (which no one denies), but if they

are capable in the intellectual order of still better and greater

achievements. The common opinion is in the negative; yet this may rest

entirely upon ambiguity of language. Without prejudging anything, we must

interrogate the facts to hand, and link them as closely as possible in

our interpretation.

As to the facts themselves we may be sparing of detail; they are to be

found in special treatises, and it is superfluous to repeat them in these

pages. It is moreover evident that a large portion of the animal kingdom

may be neglected. In its lowest regions it is so remote from us, and

has so obscure and scant a psychology, that nothing can be learned from

it. In the higher forms alone can we have any chance of finding what we

seek, i. e., (1) equivalents of concepts, (2) processes comparable with

reasoning.

In the immense realm of the invertebrates, the highest psychical

development is, by general acknowledgment, met with among the social

Hymenoptera; and the capital representatives of this group are the ants.

To these we may confine ourselves. Despite their tiny size, their brain,

particularly among the neuters, is remarkable in structure—“one of the

most marvellous atoms,” says Darwin, “in all matter, not excepting even

the human brain.” Injuries to this organ, which are frequent in their

sanguinary combats, cause disorders quite analogous to those observed in

mammals. It is useless to recall what every one knows of their habits:

their organisation of labor, varied methods of architecture, their

wars, plundering and rape, practice of slavery, methods of education,

and (in certain species) their agricultural labors, harvesting,

construction of granaries,[10] etc. We, on the contrary, must examine the

exceptional cases in which the ants depart from their general habits;

for their ability to abstract, to generalise, and to reason, can only

be established by new adaptations to unaccustomed circumstances. The

following may serve as examples:

“A nest was made near one of our tramways,” says Mr. Belt, “and to get

to the trees, the leaves of which they were harvesting, the ants had

to cross the rails, over which the cars were continually passing and

re-passing. Every time they came along a number of ants were crushed to

death. They persevered in crossing for some time, but at last set to

work and tunnelled underneath each rail. One day, when the cars were not

running, I stopped up the tunnels with stones; but although great numbers

carrying leaves were thus cut off from the nest, they would not cross the

rails, but set to work making fresh tunnels underneath them.”

Another observer, Dr. Ellendorf, who has carefully studied the ants of

Central America, recounts a similar experience. These insects cut off the

leaves of trees and carry them to their nests, where they serve various

purposes. One of their columns was returning laden with spoils.

“I placed a dry branch, nearly a foot in diameter, obliquely across their

path, which was lined on either side by an impassable barrier of high

grass, and pressed it down so tightly on the ground that they could not

creep underneath. The first comers crawled beneath the branch as far

as they could, and then tried to climb over, but failed owing to the

weight on their heads.... They then stood still as if awaiting a word of

command, and I saw with astonishment that the loads had been laid aside

by more than a foot’s length of the column, one imitating the other. And

now work began on both sides of the branch, and in about half an hour a

tunnel was made beneath it. Each ant then took up its burden again, and

the march was resumed in the most perfect order.”

They also show considerable inventiveness in the construction of bridges.

It appears from numerous observations that they know how to place straws

on the surface of water, and to keep them in equilibrium or unite their

several ends together with earth, moisten them with their saliva, restore

them when destroyed, and to construct a highway made of grains of sand,

etc. (Réaumur.) They even employ living bridges: “The ground about a

maple tree having been smeared with tar so as to check their ravages, the

first ants who attempted to cross stuck fast. But the others were not to

be thus entrapped. Turning back to the tree they carried down aphides

which they deposited on the tar one after another until they had made a

bridge over which they could cross the tarred spot without danger.”[11]

I shall cite no observations on the intelligence of wasps and bees, but

I wish to note one rudimentary case of generalisation. Huber remarked

that bees bite holes through the base of corollas when these are so long

as to prevent them from reaching the honey in the ordinary way. They

only resort to this expedient when they find they cannot reach the

nectar from above; “but having once ascertained this, they forthwith

proceed to pierce the bottoms of all the flowers of the same species.”

Doubtless association and habit may be invoked here, but before these

were produced, was there not an extension of like to like?

For the higher animals I shall also restrict myself to the upper types.

We shall of course reject all observations relating to “performing”

animals, all acquirements due to education and training by man, as also

the cases in which, as in the beaver, there is a perplexing admixture

of instinct so called (a specific property), and adaptation, varying

according to time and place.

The elephant has a reputation for intelligence which may be somewhat

exaggerated. His psychology is fairly well known. We may cite a few

characteristic traits that bear upon our subject. He will tear up bamboo

canes from the ground, break them with his feet, examine them, and repeat

the operation until he has found one that suits him; he then seizes the

branch with his trunk and uses it as a scraper to remove the leeches

which adhere to his skin at some inaccessible part of his body. “This is

a frequent occurrence, such scrapers being used by each elephant daily.”

When he is tormented by large flies he selects a branch which he strips

of its leaves, except at the top, where he leaves a fine bunch. “He will

deliberately clean it down several times, and then laying hold of its

lower end he will break it off, thus obtaining a fan or switch about five

feet long, handle included. With this he keeps the flies at bay. Say what

we may, these are both really _bona fide_ implements, each intelligently

made for a definite purpose.”

“What I particularly wish to observe,” says an experienced naturalist,

“is that there are good reasons for supposing that elephants possess

abstract ideas; for instance, I think it is impossible to doubt that they

acquire through their own experience notions of hardness and weight, and

the grounds on which I am led to think this are as follows. A captured

elephant, after he has been taught his ordinary duty, say about three

months after he is taken, is taught to pick up things from the ground

and give them to his mahout sitting on his shoulders. Now for the first

few months it is dangerous to require him to pick up anything but soft

articles, such as clothes, because the things are often handed up with

considerable force. After a time, longer with some elephants than others,

they appear to take in a knowledge of the nature of the things they are

required to lift, and the bundle of clothes will be thrown up sharply as

before, but heavy things, such as a crowbar or piece of iron chain, will

be handed up in a gentle manner; a sharp knife will be picked up by its

handle and placed on the elephant’s head, so that the mahout can also

take it by the handle. I have purposely given elephants things to lift

which they could never have seen before, and they were all handled in

such a manner as to convince me that they recognised such qualities as

hardness, sharpness, and weight.”

Lloyd Morgan, who, in his books on comparative psychology, is evidently

disposed to concede as small a measure of intelligence to animals as

possible, comments upon the above observation as follows:[12]

“Are we to suppose that these animals possess abstract ideas? I

reply—That depends upon what is meant by abstract ideas. If it is implied

that the abstract ideas are _isolates_; that is, qualities considered

quite apart from the objects of which they are characteristic, I think

not. But if it be meant that elephants, in a practical way, ‘recognise

such qualities as hardness, sharpness, and weight,’ as _predominant_

elements in the constructs they form, I am quite ready to assent to the

proposition.”

I agree fully with this conclusion, adding the one remark that between

the pure abstract notion and the “predominant” notion so called, there is

only a difference of degree. If the predominant element is not isolated,

detached, and fixed by a sign, it is certainly near being so, and

deserves on this ground to be called an abstract of the lower order.

The observation of Houzeau has been frequently quoted respecting dogs,

which, suffering from thirst in arid countries, rush forty or fifty times

into the hollows that occur along their line of march in the hope of

finding water in the dry bed. “They could not be attracted by the smell

of the water, nor by the sight of vegetation, for these are wanting. They

must thus be guided by general ideas, which are doubtless of an extremely

simple character, and, in some measure, supported by experience.”

It is on this account that the term “generic image” would in my opinion

be preferable for describing cases of this character.

“I have frequently seen not only dogs, but horses, mules, cattle, and

goats, go in search of water in places which they had never visited

before. They are guided by general principles, because they go to

these watering places at times when the latter are perfectly dry.”[13]

Undoubtedly it may be objected that association of images here plays a

preponderating part. The sight of the hollows recalls the water which,

though absent, forms part of a group of sensations which has been

perceived many times; but since the generic image is, as we shall see

later, no more than an _almost passive_ condensation of resemblances,

these facts clearly indicate its nature and its limits.

I shall merely allude without detailed comment to the numerous

observations on the aptitude of dogs and cats for finding means to

accomplish their aims, the anecdotes of their mechanical skill, and the

ruses (so well described by G. Leroy) which the fox and the hare employ

to outwit the hunter, “when they are old and schooled by experience;

since it is to their knowledge of facts that they owe their exact and

prompt inductions.” The most intelligent of all animals, the higher

orders of monkeys, have not been much studied in their wild state,

but such observations as have been made, some of which have been

contributed by celebrated naturalists, fix with sufficient distinctness

the intellectual level of the better endowed. The history of Cuvier’s

orang-outang has been quoted to satiety. The more recent books on

comparative psychology contain ample testimony to their ability to profit

by experience[14] and to construct instruments. A monkey, not having the

strength to lift up the lid of a chest, employed a stick as a lever.

“This use of a lever as a mechanical instrument is an action to which

no animal other than a monkey has ever been known to attain.” Another

monkey observed by Romanes, also “succeeded by methodical investigation,

_without assistance_, in discovering for himself the mechanical principle

of the screw; and the fact that monkeys well understand how to use stones

as hammers, is a matter of common observation.” They are also skilful in

combining their stratagems, as in the case of one who, being held captive

by a chain, and thus unable to reach a brood of ducklings, held out a

piece of bread in one hand, and on tempting a duckling within his reach,

seized it by the other, and killed it with a bite in the breast.[15]

One mental operation remains which must be examined separately, and in

its study we shall pursue the same method, wherever it occurs, throughout

this work. The process in question has the advantage of being perfectly

definite, of restricted scope, completely evolved, and accessible to

research in all the phases of its development, from the lowest to the

highest. It is that of _numeration_.

Are there animals capable of counting? G. Leroy is, I believe, the first

who answered this question in the affirmative, in a passage which is

worth transcribing, although it has been often quoted. “Among the various

ideas which necessity adds to the experience of animals, that of number

must not be overlooked. Animals count,—so much is certain; and although

up to the present time their arithmetic appears weak, it may perhaps be

possible to strengthen it. In countries where game is preserved, war is

made upon magpies because they steal the eggs of other birds.... And

in order to destroy this greedy family at a blow, game-keepers seek to

destroy the mother while sitting. To do this it is necessary to build

a well-screened watch-house at the foot of the tree where the nests

are, and in this a man is stationed to await the return of the parent

bird, but he will wait in vain if the bird has been shot at under the

same circumstances before.... To deceive this suspicious bird, the

plan was hit upon of sending two men into the watch-house, one of them

passed on while the other remained; but the magpie counted and kept her

distance. The next day three went, and again she perceived that only

two withdrew. It was eventually found necessary to send five or six men

to the watch-house in order to put her out of her calculation.... This

phenomenon, which is repeated as many times as the attempt is made, is

one of the most extraordinary instances of the sagacity of animals.”

Since then the question has been repeatedly taken up. Lubbock devotes to

it the three last pages of his book _The Senses of Animals_. According

to his observations on the nests of birds, one egg may be taken from

a nest in which there are four, but if we take away two, the bird

generally deserts its nest. The solitary wasp provisions its cell with

a fixed number of victims. Sand wasps are content with one. One species

of _Eumenes_ prepares five victims for its young, another species ten,

another fifteen, another twenty-four; but the number of the victims

is always the same for the same species. How does the insect know its

characteristic number?[16]

An experiment, methodically conducted by Romanes, proved that a

chimpanzee can count correctly as far as five, distinguishing the words

which stand for one, two, three, four, five, and at command deliver the

number of straws requested of her.[17]

Although the observations on this point are not yet sufficiently varied

and extended to enable us to speak of them as we should wish, it must

be remarked that the cases cited are not alike, and that it would be

illegitimate to reduce them all to one and the same psychological

mechanism.

1. The case of insects is the most embarrassing. It is but candid

to state a _non liquet_, since to attribute their achievements to

unconscious numeration, or to some special equivalent instinct, is

tantamount to saying nothing. Besides, we are not concerned with anything

relating to instinct.

2. The case of the monkey and his congeners stands high in the scale: it

is a form of _concrete_ numeration which we shall meet again in children,

and in the lowest representatives of humanity.

3. All the other cases resemble the alleged “arithmetic” of G. Leroy’s

magpie and similar observations. I see here not a numeration, but a

perception of plurality, which is something quite different. There are

in the brain of the animal a number of co-existing perceptions. It knows

if all are present, or if some are lacking; but a consciousness of

difference between the entire group, and the diminished defective group,

is not identical with the operation of counting. It is a preliminary

state, an introduction, nothing more, and the animal does not pass beyond

this stage, does not count in the exact sense of the word. We shall

see further on that observations with young children furnish proofs in

favor of this assertion, or at least show that it is not an unfounded

presumption, but the most probable hypothesis.

We may now without further delay (while reserving the facts which are

to be studied in the sequel to this chapter) attempt to fix the nature

of the forms of abstraction, and of reasoning, accessible to the higher

animal types.

1. The generic image results from a _spontaneous_ fusion of images,

produced by the repetition of similar, or very analogous, events.

It consists in an almost passive process of assimilation; it is not

intentional, and has for its subject only the crudest similarities. There

is an accumulation, a summation of these resemblances; they predominate

by force of numbers, for they are in the majority. Thus there is formed

a solid nucleus which predominates in consciousness, an abstract

appurtenant to all similar objects; the differences fall into oblivion.

Huxley’s comparison of the composite photographs (above cited) renders it

needless to dwell on this point. Their genesis depends on the one hand

on experience; only events that are frequently repeated can be condensed

into a generic image: on the other hand on the affective dispositions

of the subject (pleasure, pain, etc.), on interest, and on practical

utility, which render certain perceptions predominant. They require,

accordingly, no great intellectual development for their formation,

and there can be no doubt that they exist quite low down in the animal

scale. The infant of four or five months very probably possesses a

generic image of the human form and of some similar objects. It may be

remarked, further, that this lower form of abstraction can occur also

in the adult and cultivated man. If, e. g., we are suddenly transported

into a country whose flora is totally unknown to us, the repetition of

experiences suggests an unconscious condensation of similar plants; we

classify them without knowing their names, without needing to do so, and

without clearly apprehending their distinguishing characteristics, those

namely which constitute the true abstract idea of the botanist.

In sum, the generic image comes half way between individual

representation, and abstraction properly so called. It results almost

exclusively from the faculty of apprehending resemblances. The rôle of

dissociation is here extremely feeble. Everything takes place, as it

were, in an automatic, mechanical fashion, in consequence of the unequal

struggle set up in consciousness between the resemblances which are

strengthened, and the differences, each of which remains isolated.

2. It has been said that the principal utility of abstraction is as an

instrument in ratiocination. We may say the same of generic images.

By their aid animals reason. This subject has given rise to extended

discussion. Some writers resent the mere suggestion that ants, elephants,

dogs, and monkeys, should be able to reason. Yet this resentment is based

on nothing but the extremely broad and elastic signification of the

word reasoning—an operation which admits of many degrees, from simple,

empirical consecutiveness to the composite, quantitative reasoning

of higher mathematics. It is forgotten that there are here, as for

abstraction and for generalisation, _embryonic_ forms—those, i. e., which

we are now studying.

Taken in its broadest acceptation, reasoning is an operation of the mind

which consists in passing from the known to the unknown; in passing

from what is immediately given, to that which is simply suggested by

association and experience. The logician will unquestionably find this

formula too vague, but it must necessarily be so, in order to cover all

cases.

Without pretending to any rigorous enumeration, beyond all criticism, we

can, in intellectual development, distinguish the following phases in the

ascending order: perceptions and images (memories) as point of departure;

association by contiguity, association by similarity; then the advance

from known to unknown, by reasoning from particular to particular, by

analogical reasoning, and finally by the perfect forms of induction and

deduction, with their logical periods. Have all these forms of reasoning

a common substrate, a unity of composition? In other words, can they be

reduced to a single type—of induction according to some, of deduction

according to others? Although the supposition is extremely probable, it

would not be profitable to discuss the question here. We must confine

ourselves to the elementary forms which the logicians omit, or despise,

for the most part, but which, to the psychologist, are intellectual

processes as interesting as any others.

Without examining whether, as maintained by J. S. Mill, all inference

is actually from particular to particular (general propositions being

under this hypothesis only simple _reminders_, brief formulæ serving as

a base of operations) it is clear that we have in it the simplest form

of mental progress from the known to the unknown. At the same time it

is more than mere association, though transcending it only in degree.

Association by similarity is not, as we have seen, identical with

formation of generic images; this last implies fusion, mental synthesis.

So, too, reasoning from particular to particular implies something more

than simple association; it is a state of _expectation_ equivalent to

a conclusion in the empirical order; it is an anticipation. The animal

which has burned itself in swallowing some steaming food, is on its guard

in future against everything that gives off steam. Here we have more than

simple association between two anterior experiences (steam, burning);

and this state “differs from simple associative suggestion, by the fact

that the mind is less occupied with the memory of past burns than with

the expectation of a repetition of the same fact in the present instance;

that is to say, that it does not so much recall the fact of having once

been burnt as it draws the conclusion that it will be burnt.”[18]

Otherwise expressed, he is orientated less towards the past than towards

the future. Granted that this tendency to believe that what has occurred

once or twice will occur invariably, is a fruitful source of error, it

remains none the less a logical operation (judgment or ratiocination)

containing an element more than association: an inclusion of the future,

an implicit affirmation expressed in an act. Doubtless, between these

two processes,—association, inference from particular to particular—the

difference is slight enough; yet in a study of genesis and evolution, it

is just these transitional forms that are the most important.

Reasoning by analogy is of a far higher order. It is the principal

logical instrument of the child and of primitive man: the substrate of

all extension of language, of vulgar and empirical classifications,

of myths, of the earliest, quasi-scientific knowledge.[19] It is the

commencement of induction, differing from the latter, not in form, but

in its imperfectly established content. “Two things are alike in one

or several characteristics; a proposition stated is true of the one,

therefore it is true of the other. _A_ is analogous to _B_; _m_ is true

of _A_, therefore _m_ is true of _B_ also.” So runs the formula of J. S.

Mill. The animal, or child, which when ill-treated by one person extends

its hatred to all others that resemble the oppressor, reasons by analogy.

Obviously this procedure from known to unknown will vary in degree,—from

zero to the point at which it merges into complete induction.

With these general remarks, we may return to the logic of animals or

rather to the sole kind of logic possible without speech. This is,

and can only be, a _logic of images_ (Romanes employs a synonymous

expression, _logic of recepts_), which is to logic, properly so called,

what generic images are to abstraction and to generalisation proper. This

denomination is necessary; it enables us to form a separate category,

well defined by the absence of language; it permits us, in speaking of

judgment and ratiocination in animals, and in persons deprived of speech,

to know exactly what meaning is intended.

It follows that there are two principal degrees in the _logic of images_.

1. Inference from particular to particular. The bird which finds bread

upon the window, one morning, comes back next day at the same hour,

finds it again, and continues to come. It is moved by an association of

images, _plus_ the state of awaiting, of anticipation, as described above.

2. Procedure by analogy. This (at least in its higher forms in animal

intelligence) presupposes mental construction: the aim is definite, and

means to attain it are invented. To this type I should refer the cases

cited above of ants digging tunnels, forming bridges, etc. The ants are

wont to practise these operations in their normal life; their virtue lies

in the power of _dissociation_ from their habitual conditions, from their

familiar ant-heap, and of adaptation to new and unknown cases.

The logic of images has characteristics which pertain to it exclusively,

and which may be summarised as follows:

1. As material it employs concrete representations or generic images

alone, and cannot escape from this domain. It admits of fairly complex

constructions, but not of substitution. The tyro finds no great

difficulty in solving problems of elementary arithmetic (such as: 15

workmen build a wall 3 metres high in 4 days; how long will it take 4 men

to build it?), because he uses the logic of signs, replacing the concrete

facts by figures, and working out the relations of these. The logic of

images is absolutely refractory to attempts at substitution. And while it

thus acts by representation only, its progress even within this limit is

necessarily very slow, encumbered, and embarrassed by useless details,

for lack of adequate dissociation. At the same time it may, in the adult

who is practised in ratiocination, become an auxiliary in certain cases;

I am even tempted to regard it as the main auxiliary of constructive

imagination. It would be worth while to ascertain, from authentic

observations, what part it plays in the inventions of novelists, poets,

and artists. In a polemic against Max Müller, who persists in affirming

that it is radically impossible to think and reason without words, a

correspondent remarks:

“Having been all my life since school-days engaged in the practice of

architecture and civil engineering, I can assure Prof. Max Müller that

designing and invention are done entirely by mental pictures. I find

that words are only an encumbrance. In fact, words are in many cases

so cumbersome that other methods _have_ been devised for imparting

knowledge. In mechanics the graphic method, for instance.”[20]

2. Its aim is always practical. It should never be forgotten that at the

outset, the faculty of cognition is essentially utilitarian, and cannot

be otherwise, because it is employed solely for the preservation of the

individual (in finding food, distinguishing enemies from prey, and so

on). Animals exhibit only _applied_ reasoning, tested by experience;

they feel about and choose between several means,—their selection being

justified or disproved by the final issue. Correctly speaking, the

logic of images is neither true nor false; these epithets are but half

appropriate. It succeeds or fails; its gauge is success or defeat; and as

we maintained above that it is the secret spring of æsthetic invention,

let it be noticed that here again there is no question of truth or error,

but of creating a successful or abortive work.

Accordingly, it is only by an unjustifiable restriction that the higher

animals can be denied all functions beyond that of association, all

capacity for inference by similarity. W. James (after stating that, _as a

rule_, the best examples of animal sagacity “may be perfectly accounted

for by mere contiguous association, based on experience”), arrives

virtually at a conclusion no other than our own. After recalling the

well-known instance of arctic dogs harnessed to a sledge and scattering

when the ice cracked to distribute their weight, he thus explains it:

“We need only suppose that they have individually experienced wet skins

after cracking, that they have often noticed cracking to begin when

they were huddled together and that they have observed it to cease when

they scattered.” Granting this assumption, it is none the less true

that associations by contiguity are no more than the _material_ which

serves as a substratum for inference by similarity, and for the act

which follows. Again, a friend of James, accompanied by his dog, went

to his boat and found it filled with dirt and water. He remembered that

the sponge was up at the house, and not caring to tramp a third of a

mile to get it, he enacted before his terrier (as a forlorn hope) the

necessary pantomime of cleaning the boat, saying: “Sponge, sponge, go

fetch the sponge.” The dog trotted off and returned with it in his mouth,

to the great surprise of his master. Is this, properly speaking, an

act of reasoning? It would only be so, says James, if the terrier, not

finding the sponge, had brought a rag, or a cloth. By such substitution

he would have shown that, notwithstanding their different appearance,

he understood that for the purpose in view, all these objects were

identical. “This substitution, though impossible for the dog, any man

but the stupidest could not fail to do.” I am not sure of this, despite

the categorical assertion of the author; yet, discussion apart, it

must be admitted that this would be asking the dog to exhibit a man’s

reason.[21] As a matter of fact, notwithstanding contrary appearances,

James arrives at a conclusion not very different from our own. “The

characters extracted by animals are very few, and always related to

their immediate interests and emotions.” This is what we termed above,

empirical reasoning.[22]

G. Leroy said: “Animals reason, but differently from ourselves.” This

is a negative position. We advance a step farther in saying: their

reasoning consists in a heritage of concrete or generic images, adapted

to a determined end,—intermediary between the percepts and the act. It

is impossible to reduce everything to association by similarity, much

less by contiguity, alone; since such procedure results necessarily in

the formation of unchangeable habits, in limitation to a narrow routine,

whereas we have seen that certain animals are capable of breaking through

such restrictions.

ON CHILDREN.

We are here concerned with children who have not yet learned to speak,

and with such alone. In contradistinction to animals, and to deaf-mutes

when left to themselves, infancy represents a transitory state of which

no upper limit can be fixed, seeing that speech appears progressively.

The child forms his baby-vocabulary little by little, and at first

imposes it upon others, until such time as he is made to learn the

language of his country. We may provisionally neglect this period of

transition, studying only the dumb, or monosyllabic and gesture phase.

The problem proposed at the end of the seventeenth century (perhaps

before), which divided philosophers into two camps, was whether the

human individual starts with general terms, or with particulars. At a

later time, the question was proposed for the human race as a whole, in

reference to the origin of language.

Locke maintained the thesis of the particular: “The ideas that children

form of the persons with whom they converse resemble the persons

themselves, and can only be particular.”

So, too, Condillac, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, and the majority of those

who represent the so-called sensationalist school.

The thesis of the general was upheld by authors of no less authority,

commencing with Leibnitz:

“Children, and those who are ill-acquainted with the language they

desire to speak, or the matter whereof they discourse, make use of

general terms, such as _thing_, _animal_, _plant_, in lieu of the proper

terms which are wanting to them; and it is certain that all proper or

individual names were originally appellative or general.”[23]

The problem cannot be accepted under this form by contemporary

psychology. It is equivocal. Its capital error is in applying to the

embryonic state of intelligence and of language, formulæ that are

appropriate to adult life only—to the growing mind, categories valid for

the formed intellect alone. A reference to the physiology of the human

embryo will render this more intelligible. Has this embryo, up to three

months, a nose or mouth? Is it male or female? etc. Students of the

development of intra-uterine life in its first phases are very cautious

in propounding these and similar questions in such a manner; they do not

admit of definite answers. That which is in the state of envelopment and

of incessant becoming, can only be compared remotely with that which is

fixed and developed.

The sole permissible formula is this: Intelligence progresses from the

indefinite to the definite. If “indefinite” is taken as synonymous

with general, it may be said that the particular does not appear at

the outset; but neither does the general in any exact sense: the vague

would be more appropriate. In other words, no sooner has the intellect

progressed beyond the moment of perception and of its immediate

reproduction in memory, than the generic image makes its appearance,

i. e., a state intermediate between the particular and the general,

participating in the nature of the one and of the other—a confused

simplification.

Recent works on the psychology of infancy abound in examples of these

abstractions and inferior generalisations, which appear very early.[24] A

few examples will suffice.

Preyer’s child (aged thirty-one weeks) interested itself exclusively in

bottles, water-jugs, and other transparent vases with white contents;

it had thus seized upon a characteristic mark of one thing that was

important to it, to wit—milk. At a later period it designated these by

the syllable _môm_. Taine records an analogous case of a child to whom

_mm_ and _um_, and then _nim_ at first signified the pleasure of seeing

its pap, and subsequently everything eatable. We are assisting at the

genesis of the sign; the crude sound attached to a group of objects

becomes at a later period the sign of those objects, and later still an

instrument of substitution. Sigismund showed his son, aged less than

one year, and incapable of pronouncing a single word, a stuffed grouse,

saying “bird.” The child immediately looked across to the other side of

the room where there was a stuffed owl. Another child having listened

first with its right ear, then with its left, to the ticking of a watch,

stretched out its arms gleefully towards the clock on the chimney-piece

(auditory, not vocal, generic image).

Without multiplying examples known to every one, which give peremptory

proof of the existence of abstraction (partial dissociation), and of

generalisation, prior to speech, let us rather consider the heterogeneous

nature of these generic images, the result of their mode of formation.

They are in fact constructed arbitrarily,—as it were by accident,

depending partly on the apprehension of gross resemblances, partly,

and chiefly, on subjective causes, emotional dispositions, practical

interests. More rarely they are based upon essential qualities.

John Stuart Mill affirms that the majority of animals divide everything

into two categories: that which is, and that which is not edible.

Whatever we may think of this assertion, we should probably feel much

astonishment if we could penetrate and comprehend certain animal

generalisations. In the case of children we can do more than assume.

Preyer’s son employed the interjection _ass_ (which he had forged or

imitated) first for his wooden horse, mounted on wheels, and covered with

hair; next for everything that could be displaced or that moved (carts,

animals, his sister, etc.), and that had hair. Taine’s little girl

(twelve months), who had frequently been shown a copy of an infant Jesus,

from Luini, and had been told at the same time, “That is the baby,” would

in another room, on hearing anyone ask her, “Where is the baby?” turn

to any of the pictures or engravings, no matter what they were. _Baby_

signified to her some general thing: something which she found in common

in all these pictures, engravings of landscapes, and figures, i. e.,

if I do not mistake, some variegated object in a shining frame. Darwin

communicated the following observation on one of his grandsons to Romanes:

“The child, who was just beginning to speak, called a duck ‘quack,’ and,

by special association, it also called water ‘quack.’ By an appreciation

of the resemblance of qualities, it next extended the term ‘quack’ to

denote all birds and insects on the one hand, and all fluid substances on

the other. Lastly, by a still more delicate appreciation of resemblance,

the child eventually called all coins ‘quack,’ because on the back of a

French sou it had once seen the representation of an eagle.”[25]

In this case, to which we shall return later, there was a singular

mixture of intellectual operations: creation of a word by onomatopœia

(resemblance) and finally an unbridled extension of analogy.

Such observations might be multiplied. They would only confirm this

remark: the generic image varies in one case and another, because the

condensation of resemblances of which it is constituted depends often

upon a momentary impression, upon most unexpected conditions.

The development of _numeration_ in the child takes us to some extent out

of the pre-linguistic period; but it is advisable to consider it at this

point. In the first place we have to distinguish between what is learnt

and what is comprehended. The child may recite a series of numerical

words that have been taught to him: but so long as he fails to apply each

term of the series correctly to a number of corresponding objects, he

does not understand it. For the rest, this comprehension is only acquired

slowly and at a somewhat late period.

“The only distinction which the child makes at first is between the

simple object and plurality. At eighteen months, he distinguishes between

one, two, and several. At the age of three, or a little earlier, he

knows one, two, and four (2 × 2). It is not until later that he counts

a regular series; one, two, three, four. At this point he is arrested

for some time. Hence the Brahmans teach their pupils of the first class

to count up to four only; they leave it to the second class to count

up to twenty. In European children of average intelligence, the age of

six to seven years is required before they can count to ten, and about

ten years to count to one hundred. The child can doubtless repeat before

this age a numeration which it has been taught, but this is not what

constitutes knowledge of numbers; we are speaking of determining number

by objects.”[26] B. Pérez states that his personal observations have not

furnished any indication contradictory to the assertions of Houzeau. An

intelligent child of two and a half was able to count up to nineteen, but

had no clear idea of the duration of time represented by three days; it

had to be translated as follows: “not to-day but to-morrow, and another

to-morrow.”[27]

This brings us back to the question, discussed above, of the numeration

claimed for animals. Preyer tells us of one of his children that “it was

impossible to take away one of his ninepins without its being discovered

by the child, while at eighteen months he knew quite well whether one

of his ten animals was missing or not.” Yet this fact is no proof that

he was able to count up to nine or ten. To represent to oneself several

objects, and to be aware that one of them is absent, and not perceived—is

a different thing from the capacity of counting them numerically. If

the shelves of a library contain several works that are well known to

me, I can see that one is missing without knowing anything about the

total number of books upon the shelves. I have a juxtaposition of images

(visual or tactile), in which a gap is produced.

For the rest, much light is thrown on this question by Binet’s ingenious

experiments. Their principal result may be summarised as follows.[28]

A little girl of four does not know how to read or count; she has

simply learnt a few figures and applies them exactly to one, two, or

three objects; above this she gives chance names, say six or twelve,

indifferently to four objects. If a group of fifteen counters, and

another group of eighteen, of the same size, are thrown down on the

table, without arranging them in heaps, she is quick to recognise the

most numerous group. The two groups are then modified, adding now to

the right, now to the left, but so that the ratio fourteen to eighteen

is constant. In six attempts the reply is invariably exact. With the

ratio seventeen-eighteen, the reply is correct eight times, wrong once.

If, however, the groups are found with counters of unequal diameter,

everything is altered. Some (green) measure two and one-half centimetres,

others (white) measure four centimetres. Eighteen green counters are put

on one side, fourteen white counters on the other. The child then makes a

constant error, and takes the latter group to be the more numerous, and

the group of fourteen may even be reduced to ten without altering her

judgment. It is not until nine that the group of eighteen counters appear

the more numerous.

This fact can only be explained by supposing that the child appreciates

by _space_, and not by number, by a perception of continuous and not by

discontinuous size—a supposition which agrees with other experiments by

the same author to the effect that, in the comparison of lines, children

can appreciate differences of length. At this intellectual stage,

numeration is accordingly very weak, and restricted to the narrowest

limits. As soon as these are exceeded, the distribution between minus and

plus rests, not upon any real numeration, but upon a difference of mass,

felt in consciousness.

In children, _reasoning_ prior to speech is, as with animals, practical,

but well adapted to its ends. No child, if carefully watched, will fail

to give proof of it. At seventeen months, Preyer’s child, which could

not speak a word, finding that it was unable to reach a plaything placed

above its reach in a cupboard, looked about to the right and left, found

a small travelling trunk, took it, climbed up, and possessed itself of

the desired object. If this act be attributed to imitation (although

Preyer does not say this), it must be granted that it is imitation

of a particular kind,—in no way comparable with a servile copy, with

repetition pure and simple,—and that it contains an element of invention.

In analysing this fact and its numerous analogues, we became aware of

the fundamental identity of these simple inferences with those which

constitute speculative reasoning: they are of the same character. Take,

for instance, a scientific definition, such as that of Boole, which

seems at first sight little adapted to this connexion. “Reasoning is

the elimination of the middle term in a system that has two terms.”

Notwithstanding its theoretical aspect, this is rigorously applicable

to the cases with which we are occupied. Thus, in the mind of Preyer’s

child, there is a first term (desire for the plaything), a last term

(possession); the remainder is the method, scaffolding, a mean term to

be eliminated. The intellectual process in both instances, practical and

speculative, is identical; it is a mediate operation, which develops by

a series of acts in animals and children, by a series of concepts and

words in the adult.

DEAF-MUTES.

In studying intellectual development prior to speech, the group of

deaf-mutes is sufficiently distinct from those which we have been

considering. Animals do not communicate all their secrets, and leave

much to be conjectured. Children reveal only a transitory state, a

moment in the total evolution. Deaf-mutes (those at least with whom we

are dealing) are adults, comparable as such to other men, like them,

save in the absence of speech and of what results from it. They have

reached a stable mental state. Moreover, those who are instructed at a

late period, who learn a language of analytical signs, i. e., who speak

with their fingers, or emit the sounds which they read upon the lips of

others, are able to disclose their anterior mental state. It is possible

to compare the same man with himself, before and after the acquisition of

an instrument of analysis. Subjective and objective psychology combine to

enlighten us.

The intellectual level of such persons is very low (we shall return to

this): still their inferiority has been exaggerated, especially in the

last century, by virtue of the axiom, it is impossible to think without

words. Discussion of this antique aphorism is unnecessary; in its

rigorous form it finds hardly any advocates of note.[29] Since thought

is synonymous with comparing, abstracting, generalising, judging,

reasoning, i. e., with transcending in any way the purely sensorial and

affective life, the true question is not, Do we think without words? but,

To what extent can we think without words? Otherwise expressed, we have

to fix the upper limit of the logic of images, which evidently reaches

its apogee in adult deaf-mutes. Further, even in this last case, thought

without language does not attain its full development. The deaf-mute

who is left without special education, and who lives with men who have

the use of speech, is in a less favorable situation than if he forms a

society with his equals. Gérando, and others after him, remarked that

deaf-mutes in their native state communicate easily with one another.

He enumerates a long series of ideas, which they express in their

mimicry, and gestures, and many of these expressions are identical in all

countries.

“Children of about seven years old who have not yet been educated,

make use of an astonishing number of gestures and very rapid signs in

communicating with each other. _They understand each other naturally

with great facility_.... No one teaches them the initial signs, which

are, in great part, unaltered imitative movements.”

The study of this spontaneous, natural language is the sole process by

which we can penetrate to their psychology, and determine their mode

of thought. Like all other languages, it comprises a vocabulary and a

syntax. The vocabulary consists in gestures which designate objects,

qualities, acts; these correspond to our substantives and verbs. The

syntax consists in the successive order of these gestures and their

regular arrangement; it translates the movement of thought and the effort

towards analysis.

I. VOCABULARY—Gérando collected about a hundred and fifty signs, created

by deaf-mutes living in isolation or with their fellows.[30] A few of

these may be cited as examples:

_Child_—Infantile gesture, of taking the breast, or being carried, or

rocking in the cradle.

_Ox_—Imitation of the horns, or the heavy tread, or the jaws chewing the

cud.

_Dog_—Movement of the head in barking.

_Horse_—Movements of the ears, or two figures riding horseback on

another, etc.

_Bird_—Imitation of the beak with two fingers of the left hand, while the

other feeds it; or simulation of flight.

_Bread_—Signs of being hungry, of cutting, and of carrying to the mouth.

_Water_—Exhibition of saliva, imitation of a rower, or of a man pumping;

accompanied always by the sign of drinking.

_Letter_ (missive)—Gestures of writing and of sealing, or of unsealing

and reading.

Monkeys, cocks, various trades (carpenter, shoemaker, etc.) all

designated by imitative gestures. For sleep, sickness, health, etc., they

employ an appropriate gesture.

For interrogation: expression of two contradictory propositions, and

undecided glance towards the person addressed. This is rather a case of

syntax than of vocabulary; but a few signs may be further indicated for

some notions more abstract than the preceding.

_Large_—Raise the hand and look up.

_Small_—Contrary gestures.

_Bad_—Simulate tasting, and make grimace.

_Number_—Indicate with the help of the fingers; _high numbers_, rapid

opening of the hand several times in succession.

_Buy_—gesture of counting money, of giving with one hand, and taking with

the other.

_Lose_—Pretend to drop an object, and hunt for it in vain.

_Forget_—Pass the hand quickly across the forehead with a shrug of the

shoulders.

_Love_—Hold the hand on the heart (universal gesture).

_Hate_—Same gesture with sign of negation.

_Past_—Throw the hand over the shoulder several times in succession.

_Future_—Indicate a distant object with the hand, repeated imitation of

lying down in bed and getting up again.

It does not need much reflexion to see that all these signs are

_abstractions_ as well as imitations. Among the different characters

of an object, the deaf-mute chooses one that he imitates by a gesture,

and which represents the total object. Herein he proceeds exactly like

the man who speaks. The difference is that he fixes the abstract by

an attitude of the body instead of by a word. The primitive Aryan who

denominated the horse, the sun, the moon, etc., the rapid one, the

shining one, the measurer (of months), did not act otherwise; for him

also, a chosen characteristic represents the total object. There is a

fundamental identity in the two cases; thus justifying what was said

above: abstraction is a _necessary_ operation of the mind, at least in

man; he must abstract, because he must simplify.

The inferiority of these imitative signs consists in their being often

vague, with a tendency to the opposite sense; moreover, since they are

never detached completely from the object or the act which they figure,

and cannot attain to the independence of the word, they are but very

imperfect instruments of substitution.

II. SYNTAX—The mere fact of the existence of a syntax in the language of

the deaf-mutes proves that they possess a commencement of analysis, i.

e., that thought does not remain in the rudimentary state. This point has

been carefully studied by different authors: Scott, Tylor, Romanes,[31]

who assign to it the following characteristics:

1. It is a syntax of position. There are no “parts of speech,” i. e.,

terms having a fixed linguistic function: substantive, adjective, verb,

etc. The terms (gestures) borrow their grammatical value from the place

which they occupy in the series, and the relations between the terms are

not expressed.

2. It is a fundamental principle that the signs are disposed in the order

of their relative importance, everything superfluous being omitted.

3. The subject is placed before the attribute, the object (complement)

before the action, and, most frequently, the modified part before the

modifying.

Some examples will serve for the better comprehension of the ordinary

procedure of this syntax. To explain the proposition: After running, I

went to sleep, the order of gesture would be: to run, me, finished, to

sleep.—My father gave me an apple: apple, father, me, give.—The active

state is distinguished from the passive by its position: I struck Thomas

with a stick; me, Thomas, strike, stick. The Abbé Sicard, on asking a

deaf-mute, Who created God? obtained the answer: God created nothing.

Though he had no doubt as to the meaning of this inversion, he asked the

control question, Who makes shoes? Answer, shoes makes cobbler.

The dry, bare character of this syntax is evident: the terms are

juxtaposed without relation; it expresses the strictest necessity only;

it is the replica of a sterile, indistinct mode of thought.

Since we are endeavoring by its aid to fix an intellectual level, it

is not without interest to compare it with a syntax that is frequent

among the weak in intellect. “These do not decline or conjugate;

they employ a vague substantive, the infinitive alone, or the past

participle. They leave out articles, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs,

reject prepositions, employ nouns instead of pronouns. They call

themselves “father,” “mother,” “Charles,” and refer to other people by

indeterminate substantives, such as man, woman, sister, doctor, etc. They

invert the regular order of substantives and adjectives.”[32] Although

this is a case of mental regression, hence not rigorously comparable

with a mind that is sane but little developed, the mental resemblance

between the two syntaxes, and especially the absence of all expression of

relations deserves to be signalised, because it cannot be the result of a

fortuitous coincidence. It is the work of intellectual inferiority and of

relative discontinuity of thought.

There is little to say about _numeration_ in deaf-mutes. When untrained,

they can count up to ten with the help of their fingers, like many

primitive people. Moreover (according to Sicard and Gérando), they make

use of notches upon a piece of wood or some other visible mark.

To conclude, their mental feebleness, known since the days of antiquity

by Aristotle, by the Roman law which dispossessed them of part of their

civil rights, later on by many philosophers who refused even to concede

them memory, arises from their inaptitude to transcend the inferior

forms of abstraction and kindred operations. In regard to the events

of ordinary life, in the domain of the concrete (admitting, as is not

always done, that there are individual varieties, some being intelligent,

and others stupid), deaf-mutes are sufficiently apt to seize and to

comprehend the practical connexion between complex things.[33] But the

world of higher concepts, moral, religious, cosmological, is closed to

them. Observations to this effect are abundant, though here again—as must

be insisted on—they reveal great individual differences.

Thus, a deaf-mute whose friends had tried to inculcate in him a few

religious notions, believed before he came under instruction that the

Bible was a book that had been printed in heaven by workmen of Herculean

strength. This was the sole interpretation he gave to the gestures of his

parents, who endeavored to make him understand that the Bible contains

a revelation, coming from an all-powerful God who is in heaven.[34]

Another who was taken regularly to church on Sunday, and exhibited

exemplary piety, only recognised in this ceremony an act of obedience

to the clergy. There are many similar cases on record. Others on the

contrary, seek to inquire into, and to penetrate, the nature of things.

W. James[35] has published the autobiography of two deaf-mutes who became

professors, one at the asylum of Washington, the other in California.

The principal interest attaching to the first is the spontaneous

appearance of the moral sense. After stealing small sums of money from

the till of a merchant, he accidentally took a gold coin. Although

ignorant of its value, he was seized with scruples, feeling “that it was

not for a poor man like him, and that he had stolen _too much_.” He got

rid of it as best he could, and never began again.

The other biography—from which we make a few brief extracts—may be taken

as the type of an intelligent and curious deaf-mute. He was not placed

in an institution until he was eleven years old. During his childhood he

accompanied his father on long expeditions, and his curiosity was aroused

as to the origin of things: of animals and vegetables, of the earth, the

sun, the moon, the stars (at eight or nine years). He began to understand

(from five years) how children were descended from parents, and how

animals were propagated. This may have been the origin of the question

he put to himself: whence came the first man, first animal, first plant,

etc. He supposed at first that primæval man was born from the trunk of

a tree, then rejected this hypothesis as absurd, then sought in various

directions without finding. He respected the sun and moon, believed that

they went under the earth in the West, and traversed a long tunnel to

reappear in the East, etc. One day, on hearing violent peals of thunder,

he interrogated his brother, who pointed to the sky, and simulated the

zigzag of the lightning with his finger; whence he concluded for the

existence of a celestial giant whose voice was thunder. Puerile as they

may be, are these cosmogonic, theological conceptions inferior to those

of the aborigines of Oceanica and of the savage regions of South America,

who, nevertheless, have a vocal idiom, a rudimentary language?

To sum up. That which dominates among the better gifted, is the

creative imagination: it is the culminating point of their intellectual

development. Their primitive curiosity does not seem inferior to that

of average humanity; but since they cannot get beyond representation by

images they lack an instrument of intellectual progress.

ANALYTICAL GESTURES.

The question of signs is so closely allied to our subject—the evolution

of general ideas—that we must insist upon the language of gesture as

an instrument of analysis, before going on to speech—of which it is an

imperfect substitute.

St. George Mivart (_Lessons from Nature_) gives the following as a

complete classification of every species of sign, omitting those that are

written:

1. Sounds which are neither articulate nor rational, such as cries of

pain, or the murmur of a mother to her infant.

2. Sounds which are articulate but not rational, such as the talk of

parrots, or of certain idiots, who will repeat, without comprehending,

every phrase they hear.

3. Sounds which are rational but not articulate, such as the inarticulate

ejaculations by which we sometimes express assent to or dissent from

given propositions.

4. Sounds which are both rational and articulate, constituting true

“speech.”

5. Gestures which do not answer to rational conceptions, but are merely

the manifestations of emotions and feelings.

6. Gestures which do answer to rational conceptions, and are therefore

“external” but not “oral” manifestations of the _verbum mentale_.

This last group, the only one which concerns us for the moment, would to

my thinking be conveniently designated by the term _analytic gestures_,

as opposed to the synthetic gestures which manifest the different modes

of affective life, and constitute what is called the expression of the

emotions.

This language of gesture, intellectual and non-emotional, which

translates ideas, not sentiments, is more widely distributed than is

generally known, among primitive peoples. It has been observed in very

distinct regions of our globe; among the aborigines of North and South

America, the Bushmen, etc. It is a means of communication between tribes

who do not speak the same language; often, indeed, it is an indispensable

auxiliary to these indigent idioms. The most important work on this

subject is by an American, Col. Mallery, who with indefatigable patience

has collected and interpreted the gestures in use among the Indians of

North America.[36] This work alone reveals the variety of sign-language,

which hardly ever leaves the region of practical life: description of the

countries traversed, hints for travellers, directions to be followed,

distances, time required for halts, manner, habits, and dispositions of

tribes. We may cite a brief quotation, from another author:

“Meeting an Indian, I wish to ask him if he saw six waggons

drawn by horned cattle, with three Mexican and three American

teamsters, and a man mounted on horseback. I make these signs:

I point ‘you,’ then to his eyes, meaning ‘see’; then hold up

all my fingers on the right hand and the forefinger on the

left, meaning ‘six’; then I make two circles by bringing the

ends of my thumbs and forefingers together, and, holding my

two hands out, move my wrists in such a way as to indicate

waggon-wheels revolving, meaning ‘waggons’; then, by making

an upward motion with each hand from both sides of my head,

I indicate ‘horns,’ signifying horned cattle; then by first

holding up three fingers, and then by placing my extended right

hand below my lower lip and moving it downward, stopping it mid

way down the chest, I indicate ‘beard,’ meaning Mexican; and

with three fingers again, and passing my right hand from left

to right in front of my forehead, I indicate ‘white brow’ or

‘pale face.’ I then hold up my forefinger, meaning one man, and

by placing the forefinger of my left hand between the fore and

second finger of my right hand, representing a man astride of a

horse, and by moving my hands up and down, give the motion of a

horse galloping with a man on his back. I in this way ask the

Indian, ‘You see six waggons, horned cattle, three Mexicans,

three Americans, one man on horseback?’... The time required to

make these signs would be about the same as if you asked the

question verbally.”[37]

Tylor says that the language of gestures is substantially the same all

the world over, and this assertion is confirmed by all who have practised

and studied it. Its syntax resembles that of deaf-mutes, and it is

unnecessary to repeat it. The parable of the Prodigal Son was translated

by Mallery into analytic gestures; and from this language translated

afresh into the spoken tongue: “Formerly, man one, sons two,” etc., etc.

The comparison of the two texts is instructive: in the one, the thought

unfolds itself by a movement of complete analysis with relations and

shades of meaning: in the other, it resembles a line of badly quarried

blocks, put together without cement.

After what has already been said, there is nothing surprising in finding

a fundamental analogy, or even identity, between the language of

deaf-mutes and the analytic gestures of primitive peoples. It was indeed

pointed out by Akerly in an institution in New York in the beginning

of the century. Gérando gave a good many examples,[38] remarking that

the “gestures of reduction,” i. e., abridged gestures, are often enough

identical in the two cases. Mallery brought together some Utah Indians,

and a deaf-mute, who gave them a long account of a marauding expedition,

followed by a dialogue: they understood each other perfectly.

The language of analytical gesture is thus a substitute for spoken

language, and this leads us to a question which, though purely

speculative, deserves our attention for a moment.

At a time when it was almost universally admitted that man is unable

to think without words, Dugald Stewart ventured to write: “If men had

been deprived of the organs of voice or the sense of hearing, there is

no doubt that they would have invented an alphabet of visible signs

wherewith to express all their ideas and sentiments.”[39] This is no rash

assertion; we have just seen proofs of it. But is this pantomime-language

susceptible of progress?

We can hardly doubt that if humanity, with its proper cerebral

constitution, had at the same time been unable to speak, the language of

analytic gesture would, by the initiative of certain inventors, under

press of necessity, and by the influence of co-operation and of life

in common, have advanced beyond the imperfect phase at which it has

remained; and no one can say what it might have become in the accumulated

effort of centuries. Speech, too, had to traverse an embryonic period,

and oral language developed slowly and painfully. At the same time it is

an exaggeration to say that “phonetic language assumed its extraordinary

importance almost by chance, and that we cannot doubt that the language

of mimicry, had it been fashioned by social relations during secular

ages, would be hardly inferior to speech in force, facility, and

variety.”[40] In fact, man had originally two languages at his disposal;

he used the one and the other interchangeably and simultaneously. They

helped each other in the development of ideas that were as yet chaotic

and vacillating. Under these conditions, speech prevailed; the language

of gesture remained only as a survival or a substitute. There is nothing

fortuitous in this: speech has won because of its greater value.

First, for _practical_ reasons. And this is the capital factor, since

the main point is to communicate with one’s fellow-men. The language

of gesture—besides monopolising the hands, and thus keeping them from

other work—has the great disadvantage of not carrying far, and of being

impossible in the dark. To this we may add the reasons cited above: its

vague character, and (with regard to the abstract) its imitative nature,

which forbids emancipation, or complete detachment, from the concrete,

or the translation of that which cannot be represented. It is to be

remarked, however, that the invention of “reduced” signs seems to be a

transition from pure imitation to symbolism, a first step in the path of

emancipation.

Speech, on the contrary, is transmitted to a distance, and challenges

darkness. It is dependent upon the ear, an organ whose sensations are

infinite in number and kind; and in the finest expression of ideas and

of feelings, language participates in this opulence. It lends itself to

variety, delicacy, to an extreme complexity of movement in a small space,

with very little effort. We are, for the moment, citing physiological

reasons only. But these will suffice to show that the triumph of speech

has not been fortuitous, but that it is a very special case of natural

supremacy.[41]

In conclusion, there is nothing to add as to generic images, and the

logic of images. The important part which they play amongst children and

deaf-mutes testifies to their extension and importance as inferior forms

of abstraction, without in any way altering their essential nature, as

previously determined.

CHAPTER II.

SPEECH.

Before we inquire into abstraction, as fixed and expressed in

words,—whether such words are the complement of an actual or possible

representation, or exist alone in consciousness, as complete

substitutes,—it is indispensable that we should study the origin, and

still more the evolution, of this new factor. Although many linguists

resolutely abstain from considering the origin of speech (which is

certainly, like all other genetic problems, beyond the grasp of

psychology), the question is so intimately allied with that of the

evolution of articulate language, allied again in itself with the

progressive development of abstraction and of generalisation, that we

should not be justified in withholding a brief summary of the principal

hypotheses relating to this subject, while limiting ourselves to the most

recent.

I.

Launching forth then into this region of conjecture—do we, in the first

place, find among some animals, signs and means of communication which

for them are the equivalents of language? In considering this point it

matters little whether or no we accept the evolutionary thesis. It must

not be forgotten, in fact, that the problem of the origin of speech is

only a particular case of the origin of language in general: speech being

but one species among several others of the _facultas signatrix_, which

can only be manifested in the lower animals in its humblest form.

There can be no doubt that pain, joy, love, impatience, and other

emotional states are translated by proper signs, easy to determine.

Our problem, however, is different; we are concerned with signs of the

_intellectual_, not of the affective, life. In other words, can certain

animals transmit a warning, or an order, to their fellows? Can they

muster them for a co-operative act, and make themselves intelligible?

Although the interpretation is necessarily open to the suspicion of

anthropomorphism, it is difficult not to recognise a sort of language

in certain acts of animal life. Is it _a priori_ probable that animals,

which form stable and well-organised societies, should be bereft of all

means of intercommunication and comprehension?

With regard to ants, we learn from such observers as Kirby and Spence,

Huber, Franklin, that they employ a system of signs. To elucidate this

point, Lubbock undertook a series of patient experiments, certain of

which may be quoted.[42] He pinned down a dead fly so that no ant could

carry it off. The first that came made vain attempts to remove it. It

then went to the ant-hill and brought seven others to the rescue, but

hurried imprudently in front of them. “Seemingly only half awake,”

they lost the track and wandered alone for twenty minutes. The first

returned to the nest and brought back eight, who, so soon as they were

left behind by the guide, turned back again. During this time the band

of seven (or at least some of them) had discovered the fly, which they

tore in pieces and carried off to the nest. The experiment was several

times repeated, with different species, and always with the same result.

Lubbock concluded that ants were able to communicate their discoveries,

but without indicating locality. In another experiment he placed three

glasses at a distance of thirty inches from a nest of ants. One of the

glasses contained two or three larvæ, the second three hundred to six

hundred, the third none at all. He connected the nest with the glasses

by means of three parallel tapes, and placed one ant in the glass with

many larvæ and another ant in that with two or three. Each of them took a

larva and carried it to the nest, returning for another, and so on. After

each journey he put another larva into the glass with only two or three

larvæ, to replace that which had been removed, and every stranger brought

was imprisoned until the end of the experiment. Were the number of visits

to all three glasses the same? And if not, which of the two glasses

containing larvæ received the greater number of visitors? A difference

in number would seem to be conclusive as proving power of communication.

The result was that during forty-seven and a half hours two hundred

and fifty-seven friends were brought by the ants having access to the

glass containing numerous larvæ, while during an interval of fifty-three

hours there were only eighty strange visitors to the glass containing

two or three larvæ; there were no visits to the glass containing none.

Communication for bees as for ants, appears to be made by rubbing the

antennæ. If the queen is carried off in a hive, some of the bees are

sure to discover it before long. They become greatly agitated, and run

about the hive frantically, touching any companions they meet with their

crossed antennæ, and thus spreading the news through the whole community.

The bee-hunters in America discover them by choosing a clearing where

they catch a few wandering bees, which are then gorged with honey and

suffered to fly when replete. These bees return with a numerous escort.

The same process is repeated with the new comers, and by observing the

direction which they follow at their departure, the nest is discovered.

As regards the higher animals, the truth (notwithstanding the

exaggerations of G. Leroy—who asserts that when they hunt together, wait

for one another, find each other again, and give mutual aid, “these

operations would be impossible without conventions that could only be

communicated in detail by means of an articulate language [_sic_]”)

is that we know singularly little about them. It is certain that, in

addition to sounds that translate their emotions, many species have other

means of communication. According to Romanes[43] the more intelligent

dogs have the faculty of communicating with one another, by the tone of

barking, or by gesture, such simple ideas as “follow me.” This gesture is

invariably the same; being a contact of heads with a motion between a rub

and a butt, and always resulting in a definite but never complex course

of action. In a troop of reindeer the leader makes one sign for the halt,

another for the march forward, hitting the laggards one after another

with his horns. Monkeys are known to produce various sounds (the gibbon

compasses a complete octave), and several species will meet and hold a

kind of conversation. Unfortunately, notwithstanding recent researches,

we have only vague and doubtful data in regard to monkey language.

We know finally, that certain birds are able to articulate, and possess

all the material conditions of speech, the faculty being indeed by

no means uncommon. Parrots do even more; there is no doubt that they

can apply words, parts of sentences, and airs, to persons, things, or

definite events, without varying the application, which is always the

same.[44] Association by contiguity sufficiently explains this fact,

but, granting that they do not as a rule make a right intellectual use

of articulate sounds, they seem in certain instances to attach to them

the value of a _sign_. Romanes actually observed a more extraordinary

case, implying generalisation, with apposition of a sound. In the first

instance, one of his parrots imitated the barking of a terrier which

lived in the house. Later on, this barking became a denotative sound,

the proper name of the dog; for the bird barked as soon as it saw the

terrier. Finally, at a still later stage, it got into the habit of

barking when any dog, known or unknown, came into the house; but ceased

to bark at the terrier. While distinguishing individuals it therefore

perceived their resemblance. “The parrot’s name for an individual dog

became extended into a generic name for all dogs.”[45]

In short, the language of animals—so far as we know it—exhibits a very

rudimentary development, by no means proportionate to that of the logic

of images, and highly inferior to that of analytical gesture. It throws

no light, notwithstanding all that has been said, upon the problem of the

origin of speech.

In respect to this subject, which has excited human curiosity for

centuries without satiation, there appear to me (when we have eliminated

old or abandoned hypotheses) to be only two theories which have any

solidity: the one presupposes instinct; the other a slow evolution.

I. It must be remarked that if the partisans of the first theory seem at

the outset to have frankly admitted innate disposition (the fundamental

characteristic of instinct), it is more difficult to distinguish between

some of the later writers and the evolutionists.

Thus it has been said: speech is a necessary product in which neither

reflexion nor will participate, and which is derived from a secret

instinct in man (Heyse). Renan sustained a similar thesis. For Max

Müller, “man is born speaking, as he is born thinking; speech marks the

transition from (concrete) intuitions to ideas; it is a fact in the

development of the mind; it is created with no distinct consciousness

of means and end.” For Steinthal, on the contrary, “language is neither

an invention nor an innate product; man creates it himself, but it is

not begotten of the reflecting mind.” Through all these formulæ, and

others somewhat tinged with mysticism, we can discover but one point of

fact, analogous to that which states that it is in the nature of the bee

to form its comb, of the spider to weave its web. The last word of the

enigma is unconscious activity, and whether directly, or by evasions,

this school must return to innate faculties.

A somewhat recent theory,—that of L. Noiré,[46]—is distinct from the

foregoing. In these, speech is the direct (although, it is true,

unconscious) expression of intelligence; for Noiré, on the other hand,

it is the outcome of will. “Language is the result of _association_,

of community of feeling, of a sympathetic activity which, at the

outset, was accompanied by sounds...; it is the child of _will_ and not

of sensation.” Speech is derived from community of action, from the

collaboration of primitive men, from the common use of their activities.

When our muscles are in action, we feel it a relief to utter sounds. The

men who work together, the peasants who dig or thresh the grain, sailors

rowing, soldiers marching, emit more or less vibrant articulations,

sounds, exclamations, humming, songs, etc. These sounds present the

requisite characters of the constitution of articulate language; they

are common to all; they are intelligible, being associated by all with

the same acts. Action, according to Noiré, is the primitive element in

all language. Human labor is the content of primitive roots; to cut,

knock, dig, hollow, weave, row, etc. Although Max Müller adhered almost

unreservedly to this hypothesis, it has, like all others, encountered

much criticism which we need not dwell on. Is it probable, it has been

asked, that the first names should have been for acts only, not for

objects? How explain the synonyms and homonyms so frequent in primitive

language? etc.

II. The hypothesis of a progressive evolution of speech, while dating

from antiquity, has only taken a consistent form in our own days, under

the influence of transformist doctrines. The work of anthropologists and

of linguists, above all of the former, it finds support in the study of

inferior idioms and of the comparative method. Its fundamental thesis is

that articulate language is the result of a long elaboration, lasting for

centuries, in which we may with some probability reconstitute the stages.

While its authors are not in complete agreement it may be said that,

generally speaking, they admit three periods: the cry, vocalisation,

articulation.

The cry is the primordial fact, the pure animal language, a simple

vocal aspiration, without articulation. It is either reflex, expressing

needs and emotions, or, at a stage higher, intentional (to call, warn,

menace, etc.). It has been said that the speechlessness of animals is

due to the imperfection of their auditory[?] organs, and want of organic

correspondence between their acoustic images and the muscular movements

that produce sound: but the cause of this aphasia must also, and above

all, be referred to their weak cerebral development; this applies

also to primitive man. “What function could words have fulfilled when

the anthropoid of the Neanderthal or the Naulette roamed, naked and

solitary, from ditch to ditch, through the thick atmosphere, over marshy

soil, stone in hand, seeking edible plants or berries, or the trail of

females as savage as himself?”[47] It is intelligence that creates its

instruments, as well speech as all the rest.

Vocalisation (emission of vowels only) does not in itself contain the

essential elements of speech. Many animals practise it; our vowels, long

or short, even our diphthongs, can readily be recognised in the voice

of different species (dog, cat, horse, birds in large numbers, etc.).

In the child, it succeeds the period of the simple cry; and since it is

admitted that the development of the individual hints at that of the

race; that, moreover, many primitive languages or rudimentary idioms (as

such, near the time of their origin) are very rich in vowels,—it has been

concluded that there existed a longer or shorter period intermediate

between those of the cry and of articulation (this thesis has close

affinities with the theory of Darwin, Spencer, etc., which has been

rejected by other evolutionists); that speech is derived from song,

intellectual language from emotional language; in other words, that man

could sing before he could speak. Various facts are alleged in support

of this theory: (1) In monosyllabic languages, which are generally held

to be the most ancient, the accent plays a cardinal rôle; the same

syllable, according to the tone which accompanies it, takes on the most

widely different meanings. Such is the case of the Chinese. In Siamese,

_hă_ = to seek; _hâ_ = plague; _hà_ = five. (2) Other languages in which

intonation is of less importance, are nevertheless in close relation

with song, and by reason of their vocabulary and of the grammatical

construction, modulation is necessary for giving a complete sense to the

words and phrases. (3) Even in our own languages, which are completely

dissociated from song, the voice is not even in tone; it can be greatly

modified according to circumstances. Helmholtz showed that for such banal

phrases as “I have been for a walk,” “Have you been for a walk?” the

voice drops a quarter-tone for the affirmation, and rises a fifth for

the interrogation. H. Spencer called attention to several facts of the

same order, all commonplace. (4) The impassioned language of emotion

resembles song: the voice returns to its original form; “it tends,”

according to Darwin, “to assume a musical character, in virtue of the

principle of association.”

Whatever may be the force of this reasoning, conclusive for some,

doubtful for others, the conditions necessary to the existence of speech

arose with articulation only, consonants being its firmest element.

The origin of speech has been much disputed. Romanes invokes natural

selection: “The first articulation probably consisted in nothing

further than a semiotic breaking of vocal tones, in a manner resembling

that which still occurs in the so-called chattering of monkeys,—the

natural language for the expression of their mental states.”[48] It

should, however, be noted that the question, under this form, has

merely a physiological interest. The voice is as natural to man as are

the movements of his limbs; between simple voice and articulate voice

there is but the same distance as between the irregular movements of

the limbs of the newly born, and such well-co-ordinated movements as

walking. Articulation is merely one of the forms of expression: it is so

little _human_ that it is met with, as we have seen, among many of the

lower animals. The true _psychological_ problem lies elsewhere: in the

employment of articulate sounds as _objective signs_, and the attaching

of these to objects with which they are related by no natural tie.

Geiger in his _Ursprung der Sprache_ (1878) brought forward a hypothesis

which has been sustained by other authors. It may be summed up as

follows: words are an imitation of the movements of the mouth. The

predominant sense in man is that of sight; man is pre-eminently visual.

Prior to the acquisition of speech, he communicated with his fellows by

the aid of gestures, and movements of the mouth and face; he appealed

to their eyes. Their facial “grimaces,” fulfilled and elucidated by

gesture, became signs for others; they fixed their attention on them.

When articulate sounds came into being, these lent themselves to a more

or less conventional language by reason of their acquired importance. For

support of this hypothesis, we are referred to the case of non-educated

deaf-mutes. These invent articulate sounds (which of course they cannot

hear), and use them to designate certain things. While many of these

words appear to be an arbitrary creation (e. g., _ga_ = one, _ricke_ =

I will not, etc.), others result from the imitation by their mouth of

the movements perceived on the mouth of others. Such are _mumm_ = to

eat; _chip_ = to drink; _be-yr_ = barking of a dog, etc.[49] Why should

primitive man have done less than the deaf-mute, when he not only saw the

movements but heard the sounds to boot?

To conclude with a subject in which individual hypotheses abound, and

which for us is only of indirect interest, we may summarise the sketch

given recently enough (1888) by one of the principal partisans of the

evolutionary theory:

“Starting from the highly intelligent and social species of anthropoid

ape as pictured by Darwin, we can imagine that this animal was accustomed

to use its voice freely for the expression of its emotions, uttering

of danger-signals, and singing. Possibly enough also it may have been

sufficiently intelligent to use a few imitative sounds; and certainly

sooner or later the receptual life of this social animal must have

advanced far enough to have become comparable with that of an infant at

about two years of age. That is to say, this animal, although not yet

having begun to use articulate signs, must have advanced far enough in

the conventional use of natural signs (or signs with a natural origin in

tone and gesture, whether spontaneous only or intentionally imitative)

to have admitted of a tolerably free exchange of receptual ideas,

such as would be concerned in animal wants, and even, perhaps, in the

simplest forms of co-operative action. Next, I think it probable that

the advance of receptual intelligence which would have been occasioned

by this advance in sign-making, would in turn have led to a further

development of the latter,—the two thus acting and reacting on each

other until the language of tone and gesture became gradually raised

to the level of imperfect pantomime, as in children before they begin

to use words. At this stage, however, or even before it, I think very

probably vowel-sounds must have been employed in tone-language, if not

also a few of the consonants. Eventually the action and reaction of

receptual intelligence and conventional sign-making must have ended in

so far developing the former as to have admitted of the breaking up

(or articulation) of vocal sounds, as the only direction in which any

further improvement of vocal sign-making was possible. I think it not

improbable that this important stage in the development of speech was

greatly assisted by the already existing habit of articulating musical

notes, supposing our progenitors to have resembled the gibbons or the

chimpanzees in this respect. But long after this first rude beginning of

articulate speech, the language of tone and gesture would have continued

as much the most important machinery of communication. Even if we were

able to strike in again upon the history thousands of years later, we

should find that pantomime had been superseded by speech. I believe

it was an inconceivably long time before this faculty of articulate

sign-making had developed sufficiently far to begin to starve out the

more primitive and natural systems; and I believe that, even after this

starving-out process did begin, another inconceivable lapse of time must

have been required for such progress to have eventually transformed _Homo

alalus_ into _Homo sapiens_.”[50]

Among all these hypotheses we may choose or not choose; and while we have

dwelt briefly on this debated problem, whose literature is copious, we

may yet have said too much on what is mere conjecture.

One certain fact remains, that—notwithstanding the theory by which speech

is likened to an instinct breaking forth spontaneously in man—it was

at its origin so weak, so inadequate and poor, that it perforce leaned

upon the language of gesture to become intelligible. Specimens of this

mixed language are still surviving among inferior races that have nothing

in common between them, inhabiting regions of the earth with no common

resemblances.

In some cases speech coexists with the language of action (Tasmanians,

Greenlanders, savage tribes of Brazil, Grebos of Western Africa, etc.).

Gesture is here indispensable for giving precision to the vocal sounds;

it may even modify the sense. Thus, in one of these idioms, _ni ne_

signifies “I do it,” or “You do it,” according to the gesture of the

speaker. The Bushman vocabulary is so incomplete and has to be reinforced

by so many mimic signs, that it cannot be understood in the dark. In

order to converse at night, the tribe is obliged to gather round the fire.

In other cases, speech coexists with inarticulate sounds (Fuegians,

Hottentots, certain tribes of North America) which travellers have

compared, respectively, to clinking and clapping. These sounds have been

classified according to the physiological process by which they are

produced, into four (or even six) species: dental, palatal, cerebral,

lateral; it is impossible to translate them by an articulated equivalent.

“Their clappings survive,” says Sayce, “as though to show us how man,

when deprived of speech, can fix and transmit his thought by certain

sounds.” Among the Gallas, the orator haranguing the assembly marks the

punctuation of his discourse by cracking a leather thong. The blow,

according to its force, indicates a comma, semi-colon, or stop; a violent

blow makes an exclamation.[51]

It was advisable to recall these mixed states in which articulate

language had not yet left its primitive vein. They are transitional forms

between pure pantomime and the moment when speech conquered its complete

independence.

II.

In passing from the origin of speech to the study of its development,

we enter upon firmer ground. Although this development has not occurred

uniformly in every race, and the linguists—who are here our guides—do

not always agree in fixing its phases, it is nevertheless the surest

indication of the march of the human mind in its self-analysis in passing

from extreme confusion to deliberate differentiation; while the materials

are sufficiently abundant to admit of an objective study of intellectual

psychogenesis, based upon language.

This attempt has nothing in common with the “general or philosophical

grammar” of the beginning of this century. The Idealogues who founded

this had the pretension, while taking language as their basis, to analyse

the fundamental categories of intelligence: substance, quality, action,

relation. A laudable enterprise, but one which, by reason of the method

employed, could only be abortive. Knowing only the classical or modern

languages, the products of a long civilisation, they had no suspicion of

the embryonic phases; accordingly, they made a theoretical construction,

the work of logicians rather than of psychologists. Any positive genetic

investigation was inaccessible to them; they were lacking in material,

and in instruments. If by a comparison borrowed from geology, the

adult languages are assimilated to the quaternary layer; the tertiary,

secondary, and primary strata will correspond with certain idioms of less

and less complexity, which themselves contain the fossils of psychology.

These lower forms—the semi-organised or savage languages which are a

hundred times more numerous than the civilised languages—are now familiar

to us; hence there is an immense field for research and comparison. This

retrogression to the primitive leads to a point that several linguists

have designated by a term borrowed from biology: it is the protoplasmic

state “without functions of grammatical categories” (Hermann Paul).

How is it that speech issued from this undifferentiated state, and

constituted little by little its organs and functions? This question is

interesting to the linguist on certain sides, to the psychologist on

others. For us it consists in seeking how the human mind, through long

groping, conquered and perfected its instrument of analysis.

I. At the outset of this evolution, which we are to follow step by

step, we find the hypothesis of a primitive period, that of the _roots_

so called, and it is worth our while to pause over this a little.

Roots—whatever may be our opinion as to their origin—are in effect

general terms. But in what sense?

Chinese consists of 500 monosyllables which, thanks to varieties of

intonation, sufficed for the construction of the spoken language; Hebrew,

according to Renan, has about 500 roots; for Sanskrit there is no

agreement. According to a bold hypothesis of Max Müller, it is reducible

to 121, perhaps less, and “these few seeds have produced the enormous

intellectual vegetation that has covered the soil of India from the

most distant antiquity to the present day.”[52] Whatever their number

may be, the question for us reduces itself into knowing their primitive

intellectual content, their psychological value. Here we are confronted

by two very different theses. For one camp, roots are a reality; for the

other, they are the simple residuum of analysis.

“Roots are the phonetic types produced by a force inherent in the human

mind; they were created by nature,” etc., etc. Thus speaks Max Müller.

Whitney, who is rarely of the same mind, says, notwithstanding, that

all the Indo-European languages are descended from one primitive,

monosyllabic language, “that our ancestors talked with one another in

simple syllables indicative of ideas of prime importance, but wanting all

designation of their relations.”

In the other camp it is sustained that roots are the result of learned

analysis, but that there is nothing to prove that they really existed

(Sayce); that they are reconstructed by comparison and generalisation;

that, e. g., in the Aryan languages, roots bear much the same relation

to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin words as Platonic ideas to the objects

of the real world (Bréal). It has been calculated that the number of

articulate sounds which the human voice is capable of producing amounts

to three hundred and eighty-five. These sounds, for physiological

reasons, constitute a fundamental theme in the various words created by

man. Later on, linguists in comparing the vocables used in different

languages, established the frequent recurrence of certain sounds common

to several words. These have been isolated, but we must not see in them

aught besides _extracts_. Moreover, “the first stammerings of man have

nothing in common with phonetic types so arrested in form and abstract in

signification, as _dhâ_, to place, _vid_, to see, _man_, to think, and

other analogous words.”

To sum up. In the first thesis roots come into existence, _ab initio_;

words are derived from them by reduplication, flexions, affixes,

suffixes, etc.; they are the trunk upon which a whole swarm of languages

has proliferated.

In the second thesis, words come first; then the common element

disengaged by analysis, but which never existed as such in the pure and

primitive condition.

Whether the one opinion or the other be adopted, I see no conclusion

to be drawn from it save that the first terms designated qualities or

manners of being, varying with the race. The first thesis seems the

more apt in revealing to us the primitive forms of abstraction and

generalisation. If it be selected despite its fragility, one finds in

the list of roots (even when most reduced) an extraordinary mixture of

terms applied to the most disparate things (e. g., tears, break, measure,

milk, to choose, to clean, to vomit, cold, to fear, etc.). To assert

with Max Müller (from whom I borrow the preceding terms) that “these

are the one hundred and twenty-one original concepts, the primitive

intellectual baggage of the Aryan family” is to employ an unfortunate

formula, for nothing could less resemble concepts than the contents of

this list. If the second thesis be adopted, the root then being nothing

but “the exposed kernel of a family of words,” “a phonogram,” analogous

to composite photographs, formed like these by a condensation of the

similarities between several terms, then clearly primitive abstraction

and generalisation must be sought in words, and not in roots.[53]

II. Leaving this question which, from its relation to that of the origin

of speech, shares in the same obscurity, we have further to ask if the

primitive terms (whatever nature be attributed to them) were, properly

speaking, words or phrases? Did man initially give utterance to simple

denominations, or to affirmations and negations? On this point all

linguists seem to be in agreement. “Speech must express a judgment.” In

other words it is always a phrase. “Language is based on the phrase, not

on the single word: we do not think by means of words, but by means of

phrases.”[54]

This phrase may be a single word,—or composite, formed by confusion of

words as in the so-called agglutinative, polysynthetic, holophrastic

languages,—or two words, subject and attribute; or three distinct

words, subject, attribute, and copula; but beneath all these forms the

fundamental function is unalterably to affirm or deny.

The same remark has been made of children. “We must,” says Preyer,

“reject the general notion that children first employ substantives, and

afterwards verbs. My son, at the age of twenty-three months first used

an adjective to express a judgment, the first which he enunciated in his

maternal tongue; he said _heiss_ (hot) for ‘the milk is too warm.’”

Later on, the proposition was made in two words: _heim-mimi_, ‘I want to

go home and drink some milk’ (_heim_ = home, _mimi_ = milk). Taine and

others have cited several observations of the same order.[55]

According to some authors, all language that has reached complete

development has perforce passed through the three successive periods of

monosyllabism, polysynthetism, and analysis; so that the idioms that

remain monosyllabic or agglutinative would correspond to an arrest in

development. To others, this is a hypothesis, only, to be rejected.

However this may be (and it is not a question that we need to examine),

it seems rash to assert, with Sayce, “that the division of the phrase

into two parts, subject and predicate, is a pure accident, and that

if Aristotle had been Mexican (the Aztec language was polysynthetic),

his system of logic would have assumed a totally different form.” The

appearance and evolution of analytical language is not pure accident, but

the result of mental development. It is impossible to pass from synthesis

to analysis without dividing, separating, and arraying the isolated

parts in a certain order. The logic of a Mexican Aristotle might have

differed from our own in its form; but it could not have constituted

itself without fracture of its linguistic mould, without setting up a

division, at least in theory, between the elements of the discourse. The

unconscious activity by which certain idioms made towards analysis, and

passed from the period of envelopment to that of development, imposed

upon them a successive order. Polysynthetic languages have been likened

to the performance of children who want to say everything at once, their

ideas all surge up together and form a conglomeration.[56] Evidently this

method must be given up, or we must renounce all serious progress in

analysis.

To sum up the psychological value of the phrase, independently of its

multiple forms, we may conclude by the following remarks of Max Müller:

“We imagine that language is impossible without sentences, and that

sentences are impossible without the copula. This view is both right and

wrong. If we mean by sentence an utterance consisting of several words,

and a subject, and a predicate, and a copula, it is wrong.... When the

sentence consists only of subject and predicate, we may say that a copula

is understood, but the truth is that at first it was not expressed, it

was not required to be expressed; in primitive languages it was simply

impossible to express it. To be able to say _vir est bonus_, instead of

_vir bonus_, is one of the latest achievements of human speech.”[57]

III.

The evolution of speech, starting from the protoplasmic state without

organs or functions, and acquiring them little by little, proceeding

progressively from indefinite to definite, from fluid to fixed state,

can only be sketched in free outline. In details it falls within

neither our subject nor our cognisance. But the successive points of

this differentiation, which creates grammatical forms, and parts of

discourse, are under an objective form the history of the development of

intelligence, inasmuch as it abstracts, generalises, analyses, and tends

towards an ever-growing precision. The completely developed languages—and

we are speaking only of such—bear throughout the print of the unconscious

labor that has fashioned them for centuries: they are a petrified

psychology.

We must return to the roots or primitive terms, whatever may be their

nature. Two distinct categories are generally admitted: pronominal or

demonstrative roots, verbal or predicative roots.

The first form a small group that properly indicate rather the relative

position of the speaker, than any concrete quality. They are equivalent

to here, there, this, that, etc. They are few in number, and very simple

in their phonetic relations: a vowel or vowel followed by a consonant.

Many linguists refuse to admit them as roots, and think they have dropped

from the second class by attenuation of meaning.[58] Possibly they are a

survival of gesture language.

The second (verbal or predicative) is the only class that interests us.

These have swarmed in abundance. They indicate qualities or actions; that

is the important point. The first words denominated attributes or modes

of being; they were adjectives, at least in the measure in which a fixed

and rigid terminology can be applied to states in process of forming.

Primitive man was everywhere struck with the qualities of things, _ergo_

words were all originally appellative. They expressed one of the

numerous characteristics of each object; they translated a spontaneous

and natural _abstraction_: another proof of the precocious and

indispensable nature of this operation. From its earliest developments

intelligence has tended to simplify, to substitute the part for the

whole. The unconscious choice of one attribute among many others depends

on various causes; doubtless on its predominance, but above all on the

interest it has for man. “A people,” remarks Renan, “have usually many

words for what most interests them.” Thus, in Hebrew, we find 25 synonyms

for the observance of the law; 14 for faith in God; 11 for rain, etc. In

Arabic, the lion has 500 names, the serpent 200, money more than 80; the

camel has 5,744, the sword 1,000 as befits a warrior race. The Lapp whose

language is so poor, has more than 30 words to designate the reindeer,

an animal indispensable to his life.[59] These so-called synonyms each

denominate a particular aspect of things; they witness to the abundance

of primitive abstractions.

This apparent wealth soon becomes an embarrassment and an encumbrance.

Instead of 100 distinct terms, one generic substantive, plus one or

two epithets, would suffice. But the _substantive_ was not born of the

deliberate desire to obviate this inconvenience. It is a specialisation,

a limitation of the primitive meaning. Little by little the adjective

lost its qualificative value, to become the name of one of the objects

qualified. Thus in Sanskrit _dêva_ (shining) finally signified the

god; _sourya_ (the dazzling) became the sun; _akva_ (rapid) the name

of a horse, etc. This metamorphosis of adjective into substantive by a

specialisation of the general sense occurs even in our actual languages;

as, e. g., when we say in French _un brilliant_ (diamond); _le volant_

(of a machine); _un bon_ (of bread, counting-house, bank, etc.). What

is only an accident now was originally a constant process.[60] Thus the

substantive was derived from the primitive adjective; or rather, within

the primitive organism, adjective-substantive, a division has been

produced, and two grammatical functions constituted.

Many other remarks could be made on the determination of the substantive

by inflexions, declensions, the mark of the gender (masculine, feminine,

neuter); I shall confine myself to what concerns _number_, since we are

proposing to consider numeration under all its aspects. Nothing appears

more natural and clear-cut than the distinction between one and several;

as soon as we exceed pure unity, the mother of numbers, plurality appears

to us to be homogeneous in all its degrees. It has not been so from the

beginning. This is proved by the existence of the dual in an enormous

number of languages: Aryan, Semitic, Turanian, Hottentot, Australian,

etc. One, two, were counted with precision; the rest was vague. According

to Sayce, the word “three” in Aryan language at first signified “what

goes beyond.” It has been supposed that the dual was at first applied to

the paired parts of the body: the eyes, the arms, the legs. Intellectual

progress caused it to fall into disuse.

At the close of the period of first formation which we have been

considering, the sentence was only a defaced organism reproduced by one

of the following forms: (1) that; (2) that shining; (3) that sun, that

shining.[61] The verb is still absent.

With it we enter on the period of secondary formation. It was long held

to be an indisputable dogma that the _verb_ is the word _par excellence_

(_verbum_), the necessary and exclusive instrument of an affirmation.

Yet there are many inferior idioms which dispense with it, and express

affirmation by crude, roundabout processes, with no precision,—most

frequently by a juxtaposition: snow white = the snow is white; drink me

wine = I drink (or shall drink) wine, etc. Plenty of examples can be

found in special works.

In fact, the Indo-European verb is, by origin, an adjective (or

substantive) modified by a pronoun: _Bharâmi_ = carrier-me, I carry. It

is to be regretted that we cannot follow the details of this marvellous

construction,—the result of unconscious and collective labor that has

made of the verb a supple instrument, suited for all expressions, by the

invention of moods, voices, and tenses. We may note that, as regards

tenses, the distinction between the three parts of duration (which

seems to us so simple) appears to have been established very slowly.

Doubtless it can be asserted that it existed, actually, in the mind of

primitive man, but that the imperfection of his verbal instrument failed

in translating it. However this may be, it is a moot point whether the

verb, at the outset, expressed past or present. It seems at first to have

translated a vague conception of duration, of continuity in action; it

was at first “durative,” a past which still continues, a past-present.

The adjective notion contained in the verb, indefinitely as to time,

only became precise by little and little. The distinction between the

moments of duration did not occur by the same process in all languages,

and in some, highly developed, otherwise like the Semitic languages, it

remained very imperfect.[62]

The main point was to show how the adjective-substantive, modified by

the adjunction of pronominal elements, constituted another linguistic

organ, and losing its original mark little by little, became the verb

with its multiple functions. The qualificatory character fundamental to

it makes of it an instrument proper to express all degrees of abstraction

and generalisation from the highest to the lowest, to run up the scale

of lower, medium, and higher abstractions. Ex., to drink, eat, sleep,

strike;—higher, to love, pray, instruct, etc.; higher still, to act,

exist, etc. The supreme degree of abstraction, i. e., the moment at which

the verb is most empty of all concrete sense, is found in the auxiliaries

of the modern analytical languages. These, says Max Müller, occupy the

same place among the verbs, as abstract nouns among the substantives.

They date from a later epoch, and all had originally a more material and

more expressive character. Our auxiliary verbs had to traverse a long

series of vicissitudes, before they reached the desiccated, lifeless form

that makes them so appropriate to the demands of our abstract prose.

_Habere_, which is now employed in all Roman languages to express simply

a past time, at first signified “to hold fast,” “to retain.”

The author continues, retracing the history of several other auxiliary

verbs. Among them all there is one that merits particular mention

on account of its divagations: this is the verb _être_, verb _par

excellence_, verb substantive, unique; direct or understood expression of

the existence that is everywhere present. The monopoly of affirmation,

and even the privilege of an immaterial origin have been attributed

to it.[63] In the first place, it is not met with under any form in

certain languages which supplement its absence by divers processes. In

the second, it is far from being primitive; it is derived, according

to the idioms, from multiple and sufficiently discordant elements: to

breathe, live, grow (Max Müller); to breathe, grow, remain, stand upright

(_stare_) (Whitney).

Hitherto we have examined only the stable, solid parts of speech. There

remain such as are purely transitive, translating a movement of thought,

expressive of _relation_. Before we study these under their linguistic

form, it is indispensable to take up the standpoint of pure psychology,

and to know in the first place what is the nature of a relation. This can

the less be avoided inasmuch as the question has scarcely been treated

of, save by logicians, or after their fashion, and many very complete

treatises of psychology do not bestow on it a single word.[64]

“A relation,” says Herbert Spencer, “is a state of consciousness which

unites two other states of consciousness.” Although a relation is not

always a link in the rigorous sense, this definition has the great

advantage of presenting it as a reality, as a state existing by itself,

not a zero, a naught of consciousness. It possesses intrinsic characters:

(1) It is indecomposable. There are in consciousness greater and less

states; the greater (e. g., a perception) are composite, hence accessible

to analysis; they occupy an appreciable and measurable time. The lesser

(relation) are naturally beyond analysis; rapid as lightning, they

appear to be outside time. (2) It is dependent. Remove the two terms

with which it is intercalated, and the relation vanishes; but it must be

noted that the terms themselves presuppose relations; for, according to

Spencer’s just remark, “There are neither states of consciousness without

relations, nor relations without states of consciousness.” In fact: to

feel or think a relation, is to feel or think a change.

But this psychical state may be studied otherwise than by internal

observation, and the subsequent interpretation. It lends itself to an

_objective_ study, because it is incarnated in certain words. When I

say, red _and_ green, red _or_ green, there are in either case, not

two, but _three_ states of consciousness; the sole difference is in the

intermediate state which corresponds with an inclusion or an exclusion.

So, too, all our prepositions and conjunctions (_for_, _by_, _if_, _but_,

_because_) envelop a mental state, however attenuated. The study of

languages teaches us that the expression of relations is produced in two

ways, forming, as it were, two chronological layers.

The most ancient is that of the cases or declensions: a highly complex

mechanism, varying in marked degree with the idioms, and consisting in

appositions, suffixes, or modifications of the principal theme.

But these relations have only acquired their proper linguistic organ,

specialised for this function, by means of prepositions and conjunctions.

They are wanting in many languages; gesture being then substituted for

them. The principal parts of the discourse are solitary, juxtaposed

without links after the manner of the phrases used by children. Others,

somewhat less poor, have only two conjunctions: _and_, _but_. In short,

the terms on which devolved the expression of relations are of late

formation, as it were, organs _de luxe_. In the analytical languages,

prepositions and conjunctions are nouns or pronouns diverted from

their primitive acceptation, which have acquired a value expressive

of transition, condition, subordination, co-ordination, and the rest.

The psychological notion common to the greater number, if not to all,

is that of a movement. “All relations expressed by prepositions can

be referred to repose, and to movement in space and time, i. e., to

those with which the locative, accusative (movement of approximation)

and ablative (movement of departure) correspond in declension.”[65] It

may be admitted that this consciousness of movement, of change, which

is no more, fundamentally, than the sense of different directions of

thought, belongs less to the category of clear notions than to that of

subconscious states, of tendencies, of actions, which explains why the

terms of relation are wholly wanting, or rare, and only conquered their

autonomy at a late period.

With these, the progressive work of differentiation is accomplished.

Discourse has now its materials and its cement; it is capable of complex

phrases wherein all is referred and subordinated to a principal state,

contrary to those ruder essays which could only attain to simple phrases,

denuded of connective apparatus.

We have rapidly sketched this labor of organogenesis, by which language

has passed from the amorphous state to the progressive constitution

of specialised terms and grammatical functions: an evolution wholly

comparable with that which, in living bodies, starts from the fecundated

ovule, to attain by division of labor among the higher species to a fixed

adjustment of organs and functions. “Languages are natural organisms,

which, without being independent of human volition, are born, grow,

age, and die, according to determined laws.” (Schleicher.) They are

in a state of continuous renovation, of acquisition, and of loss. In

civilised languages, this incessant metamorphosis is partially checked by

enforced instruction, by tradition, and respect for the great literary

works. In savage idioms where these coercive measures are lacking, the

transformation at times occurs with such rapidity that they become

unrecognisable at the end of a few generations.

Spoken language, as a psycho-physiological mechanism, is regulated in its

evolution by physiological and psychological laws.

Among the former (with which we are not concerned), the principal is

the law of phonetic alteration, consisting in the displacement of an

articulation in a determined direction. It is dependent on the vocal

organ; thus, after the Germanic invasion, the Latin which this people

spoke fell again under the power of physiological influences which

modified it profoundly.

Among the latter, the principal is the law of analogy, the great artisan

in the extension of languages. It is a law of economy, the basis of

which is generalisation, the faculty of seizing on real or supposed

resemblances. The word remains invariable, but the mind gives it

different applications: it is a mask covering in turn several faces. It

suffices to open a dictionary to see how ingenious and perilous is this

unconscious labor. Such a word has only a few lines; it has no brilliant

record. Such another fills pages; first we see it in its primitive sense;

then—from analogy to analogy—from accident to accident—it departs from

it more and more, and ends by having quite a contrary meaning.[66] Hence

it has been said that “the object of a true etymology is to discover

the laws that have regulated the evolution of thought.” Among primitive

people, the process that entails such deviations from the primitive

sense, is sometimes of striking absurdity; or at least appears to us

as such by reason of the strange analogies that serve the extension of

the word. Thus: certain Australian tribes gave the names of mussels

(_muyum_), to books because they open and close like shell-fish; and many

other no less singular facts could be cited. Much more might be said as

to the rôle of analogy, but we must adhere to our subject.

In conclusion: it is to be regretted that linguistic psychology attracts

so few people, and that many recent treatises on psychology, excellent

on all other points, do not devote a single line to language. Yet

this study, especially if comparative, from the lowest to the most

subtle forms, would throw at least as much light on the mechanism of

the intelligence as other highly accredited processes. _Physiological

psychology_ is much in vogue, since it is rightly concluded that if the

facts of biology, normal and morbid, are being studied by naturalists

and physicians, they are available to psychologists also, under another

aspect. So too for _languages_: comparative philology has its own aim,

psychology another, proper to it. It is incredible that any one who, with

sufficient linguistic equipment, should devote himself to the task, would

fail to find adequate return for his labors.

CHAPTER III.

INTERMEDIATE FORMS OF ABSTRACTION.

Having thus acquainted ourselves with this new factor—speech—which as an

instrument of abstraction becomes steadily more and more important, we

can take up our subject from the point at which we left it. In passing

from the absence to the presence of the word, from the lower to the

intermediate forms of abstraction, we must again insist on our principal

aim: viz., to prove that abstraction and generalisation are functions

of the completely evolved mind. They exist in embryo in perception, and

in the image, and at their extreme limit involve suppression of all

concrete representation. This conclusion will hardly be contradicted. The

difficulty is to follow the evolution step by step, stage after stage,

and to note the difference by _objective_ marks.

For intermediate abstraction, this operation is very simple. It

implies the use of words; it has passed the level of pre-linguistic

abstraction and generalisation. We may go farther, and—always _with the

aid of words_—establish two classes within the total category of mean

abstraction:

1. The lower forms, bordering on generic images, whose objective mark

is the feeble participation of the word: it can indeed be altogether

foregone, and is only in the least degree an instrument of substitution.

2. The higher forms, approximating to the class of pure concepts, and

having as their objective mark the fact that words are indispensable,

since these have now become an instrument of substitution, though still

accompanied by some sensory representation.

The legitimacy of this division can be justified only by a detailed

comparison of the two classes.

I.

Before giving examples that determine the nature and intellectual trend

of the lower forms, a theoretical question presents itself which cannot

be eluded, albeit any profound discussion of it belongs to the theory of

cognition rather than to psychology. It is as follows: Is the difference

between generic images and the lowest concepts, one of nature or of

degree? This question has sometimes been propounded in a less general and

more concrete form; Is there any radical difference, any impassable gulf

between animal intelligence[67] in its higher, and human intelligence in

its lower aspects? Some authors give an absolute negation, others admit

community of nature, and of transitional forms.

I shall first reject as inadmissible the argument that identifies

abstraction with the use of words. Taine seems at times to admit this:

“We think,” he says, “the abstract characters of things by means of the

abstract names that are our abstract ideas, and the formation of our

ideas is no more than the formation of names which are substitutes.”[68]

Clearly if abstraction is impossible without words, this operation could

only begin with speech. All that was said above (Chap. I) proves the

inanity of such an assertion.

Let us, in order to discuss the question profitably, sum up the principal

characteristics of generic images on the one hand, of inferior concepts

on the other.

Generic images are: (1) simple and of the practical order; (2) the

result of often-repeated experiences; (3) extracts from very salient

resemblances; (4) a condensation into a visual, auditory, tactile, or

olfactory representation. They are the fruit of _passive_ assimilation.

The inferior concepts most akin to them, which we are studying in the

present instance, are in character: (1) less simple; (2) less frequently

repeated in experience; (3) they assume as material, similarities mingled

with sufficiently numerous differences; (4) they are fixed by a word.

They are the fruit of _active_ assimilation.

It may be said that the two classes, when thus opposed to each other,

present but minimal differences, save for the addition of words. For the

moment, indeed, the word is only an instrument handled by a bad workman,

who ignores its efficacy and highest significance, as will be proved

below. But were it otherwise, and were the delimitation between the two

classes in no way fluctuating, the thesis of a progressive evolution

must needs be given up, unless it be admitted to begin only with the

appearance of speech.[69]

Romanes describes the passage from the generic image to the concept as

follows:

“Water-fowl adopt a somewhat different mode of alighting upon land, or

even upon ice, from that which they adopt when alighting upon water;

and those kinds which dive from a height (such as terns and gannets)

never do so upon land or ice. These facts prove that these animals have

one recept answering to a solid substance, and another answering to a

fluid. Similarly a man will not dive from a height over hard ground, or

over ice, nor will he jump into water in the same way as he jumps upon

land. In other words, like the water-fowl, he has two distinct recepts,

one of which answers to solid ground, and the other to an unresisting

fluid. But unlike the water-fowl, he is able to bestow upon each of these

recepts a name, and thus to raise them both to the level of concepts.

So far as the practical purposes of locomotion are concerned, it is,

of course, immaterial whether or not he thus raises his recepts into

concepts; but, as we have seen, for many other purposes it is of the

highest importance that he is able to do this. Now, in order to do it, he

must be able to set his recept before his own mind as an object of his

own thought: before he can bestow upon these generic ideas the names of

“solid” and “fluid,” he must have cognised them as ideas. Prior to this

act of cognition, these ideas differed in no respect from the recepts

of a water-fowl; neither for the requirements of his locomotion is it

needful that they should: therefore, in so far as these requirements are

concerned, the man makes no call upon his higher faculties of ideation.

But, in virtue of this act of cognition whereby he assigns a name to an

idea known as such, he has created for himself—and for purposes other

than locomotion—a priceless possession; he has formed a concept.”[70]

In point of fact, the transition is not so simple. Romanes omits the

intermediate stages: for with fluid and liquid we penetrate into a more

elevated order of concepts than those immediately bordering on the

generic image. What he well brings out is that the bare introduction

of words does not explain everything. It must not be forgotten that

if the higher development of the intelligence depends upon the higher

development of abstraction, which itself depends upon the development

of speech, this last is conditioned, not simply by the faculty of

articulation, which exists among many animals, but by anterior cerebral

conditions that have to be sought out.

For these, we must return to the distinction loosely established above,

between passive and active assimilation. We know that the fundamental

mechanism of cognition may be reduced to two antagonistic processes,

association and dissociation, assimilation and dissimilation; to combine,

to separate; in brief, analysis and synthesis.[71] In the formation of

the generic image, as we have seen, assimilation plays the principal

part; the mind works only upon similarities. In proportion as we recede

from this point, we have the contrary; the mind works more and more upon

differences; the primitive and essential operation is a dissociation; the

fusion of similarities only appears later. The further back we go, the

more analysis preponderates, because we are pursuing resemblances more

and more hidden by differences. Coarser minds do not rise above palpable

similarities. The peasant who hears a dialect or patois closely akin to

his own understands nothing of it; it is another language to him; whereas

even a mediocre linguist immediately perceives the identity of words that

differ only in accent.

We may represent the differences between generic images, and these

general notions that most nearly approximate to them, by the following

symbol:

I. _A B C d e_

_A B C e f_

_A B C g h_, etc.

II. _A b c d e_

_x y z A f_

_g A h k m_, etc.

where each line corresponds to an object, and each letter to one of the

principal characters of the object. Table I is that of the generic image.

A part, _A B C_, is constantly repeated in each experience; moreover,

it is in relief, as indicated by the capitals; the elimination of

differences is almost passive,—self-caused; they are forgotten.

Table II is that of a fairly simple general notion. Here _A_ has to

be disengaged from all the objects in which it is included. It still

has a salient character, indicated by capitals, and recurring in each

object; but as it is merged in the differences, as it represents but a

poor fraction of the total event, it is not disengaged spontaneously; it

exacts a preliminary labor of dissociation and elimination.

Thus understood, the difference between the two processes consists only

in the faculty of greater or less dissociation, and we are in no way

authorised in assuming a difference of nature.

But the question may be propounded in a different manner,—more precise

and more embarrassing. I formulate it thus: the generic image is never,

the concept is always a judgment. We know that for logicians (formerly

at any rate) the concept is the simple and primitive element; next comes

the judgment, uniting two or several concepts; then ratiocination,

combining two or several judgments. For the psychologist, on the

contrary, affirmation is the fundamental act; the concept is the _result_

of judgments (explicit or implicit), of similarities with exclusion of

differences. If in addition to this we recall what was said above: that

speech commences with phrases only, that in its simplest form it is the

word-phrase; then the debated question may be thus transformed: Is there,

between the generic image and judgment in its lower forms, a break in

continuity, or a passage by slow transformation?

For the partisans of the first theory, the appearance of judgment is

a “passage of the Rubicon” (Max Müller). It is as impossible to deny

this as to affirm it positively and indisputably. Romanes, who makes a

stand against the “passage of the Rubicon,” admits the following stages

in the development of signs, taken as indicative of the development of

intelligence itself.

1. The indicative sign; gesture or pronominal root; a dog barking for a

door to be opened, etc.

2. The denotative sign which is affixed to particular objects, qualities,

or actions; for example, the parrot which on seeing a person utters the

name of the person, or some word which it has associated with him, and

which for the animal has become the distinctive mark of the person.

3. The connotative or attributive sign, which, rightly or wrongly, is

attributed to an entire class of objects having a common quality; for

instance, the child which applies the word _star_ to everything that

shines.

4. The denominative sign; or the intentional employment of the sign as

such, with a full appreciation of its value; for example, the word _star_

in its meaning to the astronomer.

5. The predicative sign, or a proposition formed by the apposition of two

denominative signs.[72]

This hierarchical order, while in some measure open to criticism,

indicates at least schematically the progressive passage from the

concrete to the higher abstractions, and may therefore be accepted.

It is clear that the two first stages scarcely pass beyond the concrete.

To the third, Romanes attaches capital importance: judgment begins with

it. It may, however, be asked if affirmation really exists at this stage.

For my own part I am inclined to admit it as included in the generic

image in its highest degree (for here too there are degrees), under the

form _not of a proposition, but of an action_. The hunting dog assuredly

possesses generic images of man and of different kinds of game, under

the visual and more especially the olfactory form. When it starts off on

the scent of its master, of a hare, or of a partridge, this is surely

a judgment of a certain kind, an affirmation, the least doubtful of

all, seeing that it is an act. The absence of verbal expression and of

logical information in no way alters the fundamental nature of the mental

state. We have already (Chap. I.) spoken of _practical_ judgments and

ratiocinations; it is needless to reiterate.

The transition from the third to the fourth stage is even more important.

It is here that the true concept appears; this point attained, an almost

unlimited progress is possible. Now the true cause of the true concept

is reflexion. This formula appears to us the simplest, the briefest, the

most clear, and the most exact. There is the possibility of concepts

where there is the possibility in the mind of detaching a single

character (or several), extracted from among many others, of setting it

up as an independent entity, of raising it into a _known_ object, i.

e., determined in its relations with ourselves, and with other things.

Example: to form the general idea of a vertebrate. But this fundamental

act—reflexion—is not without antecedents, it does not spring forth as a

new apparition. It is the highest degree of attention, i. e., of a mental

attitude that we encounter very low down in the animal scale.

Discontinuity of evolution, in the passage from lower to higher, is thus

far from being established. Doubtless this, like all other questions

of genesis, leaves much to hypothesis, and can only be decided on

probabilities: yet these do not appear to favor a rupture in continuity,

and opposition of nature.

In sum—to confine ourselves to what is least contestable: given the

cerebral and psychological conditions for speech (not for articulate

language alone), and application of words to qualities and attributes

raised little by little into independent entities,—and the decisive step

has been taken. Such is intellectual progress, and we may remark in

passing that the process which creates the true concept, leads fatally by

the same issue to faith in idols, in the entities realised.

Without for the moment pausing at this last point, let us under a more

positive form, and strictly on the lines of experimental psychology,

examine the nature of the lower forms of intermediate abstraction,

determining it by examples. At the same time we shall fix the

intellectual level that corresponds to the moment of transition between

generic images (animal form), and the higher abstracts which have still

to be studied in detail. The best method is to take as a type such

human races as have remained in the savage or half-civilised state:

these are more instructive than childhood, because they represent fixed

and permanent conditions. We can draw on two principal sources: their

languages, and their systems of numeration. Their religious beliefs might

also be studied, with the same results, but this would take too long, and

would moreover be less definite.[73]

1. _The languages_, considered under their most general characteristics,

reveal a notable impotence for transcending the simplest resemblances,

an incurable incapacity for extended generalisations; they hardly

rise above the concrete. Words play a very indistinct part; they are

the most incomplete substitute—hardly more than a mark, a sign, like

gestures—differing from the latter only in the future they carry within

them. The study of the ascending progress of generalisation is in

effect the study of the successive phases of the emancipation of speech

up to the time when it becomes preponderant and dominating. At the

actual stage, which might be termed _concrete-abstract_, it is not yet

emancipated; it is a minor, under tutelage.

Let us take in turn substantives, adjectives, and verbs.

The indigenes of Hawaii, says Max Müller (_Lectures on the Science of

Language_, Second Series, II., p. 19), have but one word, “aloba,” to

express love, friendship, esteem, gratitude, benevolence, etc.; on the

other hand, words to express variations in the direction of the force

of the wind are very numerous, proving once more how at its origin

abstraction or dissociation is governed by practical causes. In savage

languages there are terms to express not merely each species of dog, but

their age, the color of their hair, good or bad qualities, etc. So, too,

for the horse; there are special words to designate its varieties, and

all its movements; to indicate if it is mounted, not mounted, frightened,

running away, and the like. The North American Indians have special words

for the black oak, the white oak, and the red oak, but none for the oak

in general,—still less for tree in general. The indigenes of Brazil can

point out the different parts of the body, but not the body as a whole

(Lubbock). Among several tribes of Oceania, a special word is employed

for the tail of a dog, another for the sheep’s tail, and so on, but they

have no designation for tail in general. Again, there is no common term

for the cow, but there are distinct words for red, white, or brown cows

(Sayce).

There are, however, cases of very clear progress in generalisation; the

significance of a word extends itself; from specific it becomes generic.

This metamorphosis exists _in vivo_ among the Finns and Laplanders.

The former have a name for the smallest stream, and none for river;

originally again there was a term for each finger, none for finger in

general; but latterly the term used for thumb alone has come to designate

the fingers collectively. Among the second race, certain tribes who had

a special denomination for each kind of bay, have now adopted one that

serves for all kinds (Max Müller).

The same holds good of the poverty of the adjective, the abstract term

proper. The case of the Tasmanians has often been quoted, how they could

only express qualities by concrete representations: hard = like a stone;

long = legs; round = like a ball, like the moon, etc. (Lubbock). A less

familiar case, termed by linguists “concretism,” is met with even in

certain more developed idioms, like a survival of the time when the mind

was unable to detach itself from the concrete, or to forego a complete

and detailed qualification. Instead of saying ten merchants, five hens,

the idiom is merchants ten men, hens five birds, and so on for similar

cases.

The verb is able to express all degrees of abstraction and of

generalisation as well as the adjective and substantive. At this period,

it exactly repeats the type (as described above) of the substantive with

its burdensome multiplicity,—for want of a generalisation simple enough,

according to our judgment. The North American Indians have special

words for saying: to wash one’s face, another person’s face, the linen,

utensils, etc.: in all, thirty words, but none for washing in general.

So, too, for eating bread, fruits, meat, etc., striking with the hand,

foot, axe, etc., for cutting wood, meat, or any other objects: for all

these there are special terms, but none for saying simply, to eat, to

knock, to cut (Sayce, Hovelacque.) On the other hand, we note a case of

transition, analogous to that of the Lapps and Finlanders. Certain tribes

in Brazil have a few verbs of general, simple significance: eat, drink,

dance, see, etc., even love, thank, etc. (Lubbock).

We need not multiply examples; these will suffice to throw into relief

the extreme impotence in generalising, so soon as the mind loses its hold

on the concrete. We might also recall the difficulty so often experienced

by missionaries. They find it almost impossible, even by creating new

words, or by changing the meaning of others, to translate the sacred

books into these idioms, from their paucity of concrete terms.

2. _The numeration_, taking its development as a whole, appears to

sub-divide into three principal periods: concrete numeration, as studied

above, in animals and children; concrete-abstract numeration, with which

we are now occupied; purely abstract numeration, which we shall examine

later, as translated into organised arithmetic.

We have seen that speech at its origin was so humble as to need gesture

to complete and to elucidate it. During its concrete-abstract period,

numeration is in an analogous position. At first its extension is very

limited: it progresses slowly and painfully from unity. Further, it can

operate only when sustained by the concrete; it must have a material

accompaniment. Counting is accomplished by the enunciation of words, with

the aid of enumerated objects, as perceived at the same time, or with

that of the fingers: which, let it be remarked, is the first essay in

substitution. There is simultaneously concrete or digital, and verbal

numeration.[74]

We know that many Australian and South American tribes can count verbally

to two only; some say two-one = three; two-two = four; others by the same

process arrive at six (two-three = five, three-three = six): everything

else is “much.” For the most part they count without words, with the

aid of fingers or of articulation; even when they employ words, the two

numerations—digital and verbal—are performed simultaneously.[75]

This manner of counting is in first degree concrete; the

concrete-abstract form is only there in embryo. A great advance, made

early enough in many tribes, consisted in counting by five, taking the

hand (five fingers) as a new unit, superior to the simple unit. Then:

one hand = 5; two hands or half a man = 10; two hands, one foot = 15;

two hands, two feet, or a man = 20. Such is the evident origin of the

quinary, decimal, and vigesimal numerations. Sometimes fingers, as

instruments of numeration, have been replaced by objects of a typical

number. Ex.: 1 = moon or sun; 2 = the eyes or legs, etc.

However varied these processes (of which only a few have been mentioned)

in different races and periods, they are fundamentally identical to

the psychologist. They may be reduced to this; numeration is performed

more particularly with the aids of sensible perceptions; words are

but an insignificant accompaniment, a superfluity—existing only as a

proliferation—of so little utility that they are for the most part

neglected.

Though it is less often spoken of, we may remark that the measure of

continuous quantity passed through the same concrete-abstract phase;

and here it appeared at a somewhat early stage, owing to practical and

social wants. Hence we find at the outset, the foot, the finger, the

thumb (inch = Fr. _pouce_), the palestra (four fingers’ length), span,

cubit (arm’s reach = _coudée_), fathom, etc., the stadium (distance a

good runner could cover without stopping).[76] The concrete character

of all these measures is obvious. Again, there are survivals in certain

current locutions, such as a day’s journey. More than this; they have a

_human_ character, their standard and starting-point being, at least at

the outset, certain parts of the body, or a determined sum of muscular

movements. Little by little they lost their original significance,

progressing through centuries towards our metrical system the type of a

scientific, deliberate, rationally abstract system, as far as possible

liberated from anthropomorphism.

The reader will probably obtain a more definite idea of the nature of

these lower forms by recapitulating the examples cited, than from any

long dissertation. Is their intellectual level very superior to that

of the generic image? This question is doubtful. At times the only

distinction between them is the presence of the word: at the present

stage it makes but a poor figure,—yet with all its modesty, it augurs a

new world wherein it is to be of prime importance.

II.

We now pass to a study of transition. In ascending from the lower to

the _higher_ forms of abstraction, we traverse the intermediate region

between the states directly superposed upon generic images, and the

higher concepts. In fact, we shall to some extent have to penetrate into

this extreme region, before the close of the chapter.

At the risk of repetition, we must first indicate the characteristics

by which the general notions we are at present concerned with are

distinguished from the abstractions above and below them. To recapitulate

briefly: In the concrete-abstract phase (which we are leaving) the

general notion—so-called—is constituted by concrete elements, _plus_

words, whose substitutory office is weak or null.

In the abstract phase (upon which we are entering) the concept is

constituted by an evoked or evocable image, which may exhibit every

degree from clear representation to the pure schema, _plus_ the word

that now becomes the principal element.

In the phase of higher abstractions (to be studied later), no sensory

representation arises, or should any such appear, reflexion would find

in it only a dubious support, often an obstacle: the word meantime has

acquired absolute supremacy in consciousness.

Taken as a whole, psychological development exhibits a complex

phenomenon, a binary compound, in which one element is always increasing,

the other as steadily decreasing. Words pass from nonentity to autocracy;

the concrete from supremacy to nonentity.

We must now return to the higher forms of intermediate abstraction, since

we may not content ourselves with any purely theoretical determination.

Characteristic examples must be selected; and here we find a certain

embarrassment. Does our choice fall on numeration? Yet on leaving the

concrete-abstract period, this at once finds its formative law, and

introduces us to pure abstraction. Are we to select language? This

procedure might seem to be appropriate, seeing that the general ideas

with which we are occupied constitute the substrata of our highly

civilised modern languages, when, on the other hand, the more developed

concepts (of mathematics, metaphysics, etc.) are only found rarely and

incidentally. One might even plunder the dictionary, extracting all

general terms, with elimination of those that are purely scientific, and

classification of the former according to their increasing degree of

generality. But this method, besides being very laborious and incapable

of reduction to a clear statement for the reader, would suffer the

cardinal defect of being arbitrary. How, indeed, could any common measure

be established for all these general terms, issuing from the most

diverse sources of human activity?[77]

But the best method would seem to be that of taking as our basis

the classifications of the naturalists, following their development

historically. Here we have the advantage of positive documents, since

these refer to concrete beings, and are formed according to characters

observed empirically. They create, namely, an ascending progress

from the individual to the more general notions, by a methodical

process of filiation; they operate upon living beings, or objects of

the same nature, having consequently a common standard. The history,

even in brief, of these classifications is instructive: it shows the

progressive passage of concrete-abstract ideas to more and more abstract

concepts, from a statement of gross resemblances to the quest after

subtle similarities, from the period of assimilation to that in which

dissociation predominates.

Among these different classifications, we may select those of the

zoologists, since they appear to be the most numerous, most complete,

and best elaborated. For the rest, the succeeding observations apply

equally, _mutatis mutandis_, to the classifications of the botanists.

We need scarcely add that our study is strictly psychological, that

its object is not the absolute value of classifications, but the

determination of the processes followed by the human mind, in proportion

as the zoölogical taxonomy has constituted itself.

At the outset we find a pre-scientific period as to which we know little;

for these essays in classification differ, according to times and

races. The Bible, Hindu literature, the primitive poets and historians

of Greece, do however provide sufficient indications of the manner in

which man originally classified other living beings. The repartition was

usually made in three great categories, according as the animals lived in

the water, or upon the earth, or flew in the air. The subdivisions are

remarkable. Thus, among terrestrial animals, there are some that walk,

and some that climb: in this last group there is a mixture of articulate

creatures, of molluscs, reptiles and amphibians. Among aerial animals,

we find birds, and many flying insects. These primitive classifications

are based upon perception far more than on abstraction, or at any rate

rest upon superficial resemblances. The habitual environment, air,

water, earth, determines the cardinal classes. Some easily apprehended

characteristic makes the subdivisions: e. g., flight (birds, insects),

locomotion (walking, climbing). The method employed is hardly superior

to that by which generic images are formed; and in the order of

classification, this point corresponds with the concrete-abstract period

of primitive languages, numerations, and religions, i. e., to a gross

generalisation fixed by a word.

The scientific period begins with Aristotle. It has been affirmed that he

owes numerous points to predecessors whom he fails to mention: this is

a historical matter of no interest in the present connexion. With him,

or under his name, we have the commencement of comparative anatomy which

involves a preliminary labor of analysis, unknown in the pre-scientific

period, and marking the transition from apparent and superficial to

profound and essential resemblances. His classification is of course

imperfect, often inconsistent; it bears the impress of an epoch of

transition.

His terminology is poor, unstable, floating. He distinguishes two sorts

of groups only: the genus (γένος) and the species (εἶδος). “But the term

γένος has the least constant significance: it serves as the indistinct

designation of any group of species, however great its extension, as

well what we now term classes, as other lower groups.”[78] Sometimes

however Aristotle speaks of large genera (γένη μέγαλα) and of very large

genera (γένη μέγιστα), without any precise denotation. It has been

said that penury of words was an obstacle to him: yet this is hardly a

plausible reason, seeing that he found means to create the word ἔντομα to

designate insects. The true obstacle was the insufficient determination

of character.

Again, independently of nomenclature, “while Aristotle knew a fairly

large number of animals, the notion of grouping them in definite order,

which should express their greater or less degree of similarity, does

not appear to have presented itself to his mind. Hence he did not

attempt what we call classification. He compares different animals

together, by every possible means, and endeavors to reduce the result

of his comparisons to general propositions.” In this way he arrives at

relations which are sometimes important, sometimes without importance.

For example: among animals, some have blood, some lymph, which takes its

place: this division, notwithstanding the error on which it is based,

corresponds broadly speaking with the distinction between vertebrates and

invertebrates. Animals “which have blood” are subdivided into viviparous

and oviparous. Further, animals that fly are ranged in three categories,

according as their wings are feathered (birds), or formed by a fold of

skin (bats), or dry, thin, and membranous (insects). Then there is a

division of animals into aquatic and terrestrial, social and solitary,

migratory and sedentary, diurnal and nocturnal, domestic and wild, etc.

In sum, there is co-existence of two processes: one scientific, implying

a preliminary analysis; the other of common observation, which does not

sensibly differ from concrete-abstract classifications; and the idea of a

hierarchy formed by abstraction of abstracts, by a systematic arrangement

of the animal kingdom, has not yet made its appearance. Yet Aristotle’s

work, just by reason of its composite nature, is interesting to the

psychologist who studies the evolution of the faculty of abstracting and

generalising.

We may pass over two thousand years, during which no progress was made,

till we come to Linnæus. “He was the first man who distinctly conceived

the idea of expressing, under a definite formula, what he believed to be

the system of nature.” His nomenclature is fixed. Under the names of

classes (_genus summum_), orders (_genus intermedium_), genera (_genus

proximum_), species, varieties, he proposes subdivisions of decreasing

value, embracing a greater or less number of animals which all present

in common more or less general attributes. He pursues the research after

fundamental characteristics, and _essential_ similarities, incessantly

correcting his first results. Thus it is only at the eleventh edition of

his _Systema naturæ_ that the class of “Quadrupeds” is converted into

Mammals: the Cetacea are included in this class, and no longer placed

among the fish, as also bats, which were formerly classified with birds,

etc.[79] Whatever their objective value, we have here a true system of

rational concepts.

We may instance Cuvier for the clearness with which he separates the

predominant and subordinate characteristics: “If,” he says, “we consider

the animal kingdom on the principles just laid down, regarding only

the organisation and nature of the animals, instead of their size and

utility, according to our knowledge of them, or the sum of accessory

circumstances, we find that there are four principal forms, four general

plans, if we may so express ourselves, on which all animals seem to

have been modelled,” etc. These four branches (a new word created by

him), which he held to be irreducible, were the Vertebrata, Articulata,

Mollusca, and Radiata.

Finally, since the progress of consecutive abstraction and generalisation

consists in incessantly seeking out extracts of extracts, and

simplifications of simplifications, the natural movement of the mind

tends fatally towards pure unity as its supreme end. This last phase

belongs to the nineteenth century, and still more to the contemporary

epoch. It comes from various sources, and has assumed different forms:

1. Speculative in the school of Schelling. To Oken, the highest

representative of this view, man is the prototype and measure of animal

organisation; all other animals are constructed after his pattern. “Their

body is in some sort the analysed body of a man; the human organs live,

whether in isolation, or in different combinations, in the state of

independent animals. Each such combination constitutes a class.”

2. Embryological, according to the labors of Von Baer. While Cuvier, in

classification, brought anatomy and morphology to the front, a new system

now appears, founded upon development only; the science of embryology.

To be accurate, Baer’s conception was not unitary, since it admitted

four types: peripheral (radiate), massive (molluscan), longitudinal

(articulated), bi-symmetrical (vertebrate). But little by little, the

oft-substantiated principle asserted itself and found firm footing among

his successors: the animal with the highest organisation passes, during

its individual development, through phases which, in less highly evolved

beings, are permanent states; or, more briefly, among the higher animals,

ontogenesis is a repetition of phylogenesis.

3. Transformist. The boldest partisans of this view, e. g., Haeckel,

adopt a rigorously unitary conception: all the innumerable examples of

the animal kingdom have issued from one common stock.

In all there is a fundamental trend of the mind towards the idea of

original unity. It is unimportant for the moment to examine whether

this concept of ideal unity (we might also recall the vegetable ideal

of Goethe, and the vertebrate ideal of Richard Owen) is a delusion, or

a true apprehension: we shall return to this later, in discussing the

_objective_ value of the notions of genus and species (Chap. V. § vi). At

this point, the _subjective_ psychological process alone is relevant to

our purpose.

This review has no pretensions at being even an abridged history of

zoölogical classifications. It merely aims at showing by facts, (1) how

a hierarchy of concepts is constituted, and in the travail of centuries

passes from the period of generic images to the ideal of embryological

unity, common to all beings; (2) how the work of dissociation and

analysis has always gone on, and multiplied, in quest of similarities

more and more difficult to discover—often indeed fragile or dubious—to

stop at unity only, the supreme abstraction.

We are now at the threshold of the last period of abstraction, that of

complete symbolism, and it is not without interest to note that what

passes in the theoretical order has its equivalent in another form of

human activity—the practical order—where the mechanism of exchange is

again developed by the aid of an ever-increasing substitution. Thus,

at the lowest stage, all commercial transactions are reduced to truck,

to exchange by barter. The concrete for the concrete is the method of

primitive peoples. An immense step is taken when this rudimentary process

is succeeded by the employment of precious metals. A substitutory value

is taken as the common measure of other values. At the outset, silver and

gold, in the form of powder or of small bullion, were weighed out by

the contractors for each particular transaction. Next, this inconvenient

procedure was replaced by coined money, issued under the control of an

officer, or of the social aggregate, thus conferring a general value

on the instrument of exchange. Lastly, at a much later period, bills

of exchange, bank-notes, and numerous forms of letters of credit, were

substituted for gold and silver; so that a sheet of paper worth less than

a centime may become the symbol of millions and tens of millions.

This resemblance of the two cases is by no means fortuitous. It is

based upon identity of psychological process, namely a substitution

of ascending degrees, an ever increasing simplification, whether in

the order of speculative research, or in the department of commercial

transaction: and just as paper tokens, unless financially convertible

into objects of consumption, for use or luxury, are nonentities that

can accumulate in the bank without the gain of anything more than a

simulacrum—so, if the highest symbols of abstraction cannot be reduced

to the data of experience, we may, as too often occurs, accumulate,

manipulate, build up concepts, and still be in a state of permanent

intellectual bankruptcy.

CHAPTER IV.

THE HIGHER FORMS OF ABSTRACTION. THEIR NATURE.

Before we embark on the study of the principal concepts, it is incumbent

upon us (in order to determine for each of these, separately, the

conditions of their genesis and development—as was shown for abstraction

in general) to throw as much light as possible upon the very vexed

question of the psychological nature of the concepts of pure symbolism,

where the word appears as the sole element that exists in consciousness.

Is it true that we can think effectually and usefully with words and

nothing but words, as has been sustained to satiety? Is not this

assertion founded upon the misapprehension of a factor which, although it

does not enter into consciousness, is none the less in active existence?

The investigation of this point is the prime object of the following

chapter.

It is unnecessary to enter in detail into the researches of the last

thirty years, as to the seat and the nature of images. Yet since these

have been the point of departure of the following inquiry, the results

may be briefly summarised.

It is generally admitted that the image occupies the same seat as the

percept of which it is a weak and incomplete residuum, i. e., in order

to produce itself in consciousness it demands the putting into activity

of certain definite portions of the cerebral centres. The energy of the

representative faculty does not merely vary from individual to individual

in a general manner: there are particular forms of imagination,

constituted by the very marked predominance of a certain group of

representations, visual, auditory, muscular, olfactory, gustatory.

Normal observation, and still more pathological documents, have thus

determined certain types. We may also (though this is mere hypothesis

and difficult to verify) admit a “mixed” or “indifferent” type, in which

the different species of sensations are represented by corresponding

images of equal clearness and vigor, without marked predominance of

any one group, whilst still maintaining their relative importance: e.

g., it is clear that in man the visual and olfactory images cannot be

equivalent in absolute importance. Excluding this indifferent type, we

have three principal “pure” types: visual, auditory, muscular or motor,

signifying a tendency to represent things in terms borrowed from vision,

from sound, or from movement. If we push the investigation further, we

find that these types again imply variations or sub-types. Thus there may

be a lively faculty for representation of complex visual forms (faces,

landscapes, monuments) along with a weak sense for graphic signs (printed

or written words) and so on.

The numerous works devoted to this subject, and too well known to be

insisted on here, lead us to this conclusion: that there is no general

faculty of imagination. This is a vague term which designates very

different individual variations; these last alone have any psychological

reality, and are alone important in cognising the mechanism of the

intellect.

May it not be the same for the faculty of conception? May not the word

“general idea” or “concept” be in its kind the equivalent of the word

image, namely a vague formula,—its psychological reality lying in types

or variations as yet undetermined? I am exposing for ideas, the problem

that has already been set forth for images, while recognising its much

greater obscurity. The psycho-physiological conditions of the existence

of concepts are practically unknown: this is a _terra incognita_ wherein

the new psychology has hardly adventured itself, and where it would

indeed have been chimerical to tread before the preliminary study of the

image.

I.

The question I have set myself to elucidate is very modest, very limited

and circumscribed, representing only part of the problem indicated above.

It may, however, teach us something of the ultimate nature of concepts.

It is as follows:

When we think, hear, or read a general term, what arises as sign in

consciousness, _directly and without reflexion_?

I have purposely italicised these words in order to emphasise my

principal aim, which was to discover the _instantaneous_ operations

(conscious or unconscious) that occur in such a case, in persons whose

habits of mind are widely different. I endeavored as much as possible to

eliminate reflexion and to seize the mental state. With time and effort,

minds that are least apt in abstraction will arrive at a more or less

successful translation of general terms, or at the substitution for them

of some mangled and halting definition. I set myself as far as possible

to suppress this secondary phase of the mental process, and to arrest it

at the first, in order to determine what the word evokes immediately[80]

and in what degree this differs with the individual.

In order to make the answers more exactly comparable, I interrogated only

the adults of both sexes, excluding all children. It was indispensable

to my investigation that it should comprise people of very different

degrees of culture, habits of mind, and profession. The principal classes

were mathematicians, physicists, doctors, scientists, philosophers,

painters, musicians, architects, men of the world, women, novelists,

poets, artisans. The last class made such confused replies that I must

regard their documents as worthiest. Too much is left for individual

interpretation. The total number of persons interrogated amounted to one

hundred and three.

The method was invariably the same. We said to the subject: “I am going

to pronounce certain words; will you tell me directly, without reflexion,

whether this word calls up anything or nothing in your mind? If anything,

what is suggested to you?” The reply was noted down at once; if delayed

beyond five to seven seconds, it was held to be null, or doubtful. In

the case of naïve subjects, I employed certain preliminaries: before

pronouncing abstract words, concrete terms (designating a monument, or

person) such as would evoke a simple image, were heard; then the impulse

being given, I proceeded to the enumeration of general terms.

The words which served as material for the inquiry were fourteen in

number, proceeding from the concrete to the highest abstractions. They

were enunciated in an indifferent order and were as follows: _dog_,

_animal_, _color_, _form_, _justice_, _goodness_, _virtue_, _law_,[81]

_number_, _force_, _time_, _relation_, _cause_, _infinity_.

The inquiry was invariably oral, never in writing, the greatest care

being taken to prevent the person from knowing the end in view, unless

afterwards: which led in certain cases to interesting explanations. The

very nature of my method prevented me from extending it as widely as

I could have wished. I could not, as was done in England, distribute

printed questions among the public, because it was necessary to note

the spontaneous answer immediately before it was corrected by later

reflection. Moreover, I needed unsophisticated subjects, ignorant of my

purpose, and therefore eliminated all whom I suspected of being even

indirectly acquainted with it.

The majority were interrogated on the fourteen terms cited above, others

on a few only; so that the total number of responses was over nine

hundred. It would be beside the mark to publish them here. They are

nothing more than data which have to be interpreted. Three principal

or pure types appear to stand out from them, besides the failures or

mixed cases. These may be termed the _concrete_ type, the _visual

typographic_ type, and the _auditory_ type. Each of these corresponds

with a particular mode of representing the general idea. We will examine

them separately.

1. CONCRETE TYPE. Here the abstract word nearly always evokes an image,

vague or precise; usually visual, sometimes muscular. It is not a simple

sign, it does not represent the total substitution, it is not dry, and

finally reduced. It is immediately and spontaneously transformed into a

concrete. In fact, the persons of this type think only in images. Words

are for them no more than a kind of vehicle, a social instrument of

mutual comprehension. When a sequence of general or abstract terms passes

through their minds, what really passes is a succession of concretes,

save for the very abstract words which “evoke nothing.” This is an answer

I have often received, and which, in virtue of its importance, will be

considered apart, at the end of this chapter.

The concrete type appears to be the most widely distributed; it obtains

almost to exclusion among women, artists, and all who have not the habit

of scientific abstraction. I have selected a few examples from among the

many observations belonging to this type.

A painter.—_Cause_: nothing. _Relation_: relations of terms; recital,

written report. _Law_: judges in red robes. _Number_: vague. _Color_:

contrast between green of plant, and red of drapery. _Form_: a round

block, a woman’s shoulder. _Sound_: a murmur. _Dog_: ears of a dog

running. _Animal_: vague collection, as in certain Dutch pictures.

_Force_: hits out with his fists. _Goodness_: his young mother, seen

vaguely. _Time_: Saturn with his scythe. _Infinity_: a black hole.

A woman.—_Cause_: I had been the cause of her son’s success. _Law_:

the government is bad. _Color_: sees an impressionist picture by her

son. _Form_: names a beautiful person. _Goodness and Virtue_: names

two people who each have this quality. _Force_: sees men fighting.

_Relation_: social relations between husband and wife. _Justice_: sees an

audience-hall and judges. _Dog_: sees a dog that bit one of her parents.

_Infinity_: nothing. _Time_: a metronome.

These two interrogatories are complete. I might proceed by another

method: that of taking each general term (law, cause, number, etc.) and

quoting all the answers received, among which many would be identical.

Such an enumeration would be long and superfluous: we cannot, however,

neglect a few of the particulars. For the word _cause_, several persons

(women, artists, people in society) replied “_cause célèbre_,” “_procès

célèbre_,” for the most part mentioning one only, and that some recent

trial. At first this reply annoyed me, and appeared to be useless for

my inquiry. Later, on the other hand, I felt it to be instructive,

because it characterises better than any description the type which I

have denoted as concrete, and the particular turn of this kind of mind,

in which the abstract sense does not present itself, at any rate at the

beginning.

I may also note two answers given me immediately by a celebrated

painter:—_Number_: I see many brilliant points. _Law_: I see parallel

lines. (Is this the unconscious idea of levelling by the law?)

The terms _goodness_ and _virtue_ suggested answers which are easily

summarised: they fall into two categories. (1) Nothing; this answer does

not belong to the concrete type; (2) a definite person, who was always

named and who thus becomes the incarnation, the concrete representation.

Nearly all the images evoked belong to the visual sense; the word

_force_, however, most frequently called up pure muscular images, or

the same accompanied by a vague visual representation. Example—Seeing

somebody lifting a weight; I vaguely see something pulling; a weight

suspended by a ring; a string drawing on a nail; pressure of my fist in a

fluid; the Marshal of Saxony breaking an _écu_ of six pounds, etc.

I have been describing the ordinary and principal form of the concrete

type. It consists in the immediate and spontaneous substitution of a

particular case (fact or individual) for the general term. In certain

observations a slightly different _variation_ may be detected; I have

encountered it among several historians and learned men. In the ordinary

type, the whole (general) is thought by means of the part (concrete); in

the variation, the thinking is by analogy, and the mechanism seems to be

reduced to pure association. A few examples will explain the distinction.

The replies in duplicate were given by different persons. _Number_:

the “Language of Calculation,” Pythagoras. _Cause_: Hume’s theory of

causality; Kant’s theory. _Law_: the “Tables of Malaga,” Montesquieu’s

definition. _Color_: the chemistry of the spectrum. _Justice_: Littré’s

definition. _Animal_: the πὲρι ψυχῆς of Aristotle. _Time_: a vague

metaphysical theory. _Relation_: discussion of Ampère and Tracy on

this subject. _Infinity_: books on mathematics. _Color_: treatises of

photography, etc.

It might be objected that there is a certain association in ordinary

cases as in these; but the distinction will readily be perceived. The

former proceed from that which contains, to the content—from the class

to the fact: they think the whole by means of the part; there is an

internal association. The latter form associations beside and from

without. Apparently these do not reach to the concrete, they stop half

way; for a complete generality they substitute a semi-generality. Further

than this, my data are neither sufficiently numerous, nor clear enough,

for the point to be insisted on.

2. VISUAL TYPOGRAPHIC TYPE. Nothing is easier to define. In its pure form

it consists in seeing printed words and nothing more; in three cases

words were seen _written_. Among some the vision of the printed words

was accompanied by a concrete image as in the first type, but only for

semi-concrete concepts (dog, animal, color); for the higher abstracts

(time, cause, infinity, etc.) the typographical vision alone exists.[82]

This mode of representation is widely distributed among those who have

read much; but there are many exceptions.

No doubt many of my readers will discover from self-observation that

they belong to this type. I have further noticed that all who have this

mode of representation regard it as normal, and necessary, in anyone who

knows how to read. This is a fallacy. I do not possess it myself in the

faintest degree, and have met many others who resemble me.

Thus I was little prepared to discover this type; and had even reached

my thirtieth observation without suspecting it, when I encountered such

a clear case as to put me on the track. I was interrogating a well-known

physiologist. To every word except _Law_ and _Form_, he replied “I see

them in printed characters” and was able to describe these accurately.

Even the words _dog_[83], _animal_, _color_, were unaccompanied by any

image. He volunteered further information which may be reduced to the

statement, “I see everything typographically.” The same holds good for

concrete objects. If he hears the names of his intimate friends whom

he meets every day, he sees the names printed; it is only by an effort

of thought that he sees the image. The word “water” appears to him as

if printed, and he has no vision of a liquid. If he thinks of carbonic

acid, or nitrogen, he sees indifferently either the words printed or the

symbols CO₂, N. He does not see the complex formulæ of organic chemistry,

but the words only.

Surprised (from the reasons above indicated) at this observation—of the

sincerity and precision of which there could be no doubt—I continued my

investigation, and discovered this mode of thinking in general terms to

be sufficiently common. Several cases indeed were as pure and as detailed

as the one just cited. Thenceforward I adopted the habit of invariably

asking at the close of my interrogatory “Did you see the words printed?”

Several people remarked that they had read a great deal, and corrected

many proofs, and that this would account for their belonging to the

typographical visual type. The influence of habit is certainly enormous,

but is no adequate explanation here, since there are many exceptions. I

have myself read and corrected many proofs, but no word ever appeared in

my consciousness as printed, unless after considerable effort, and then

vaguely. Hence this mode must be due in great part to natural disposition.

Among the compositors questioned I found: (1) That they saw my fourteen

words printed in some special type, which they occasionally specified;

(2) they had a concomitant image for semi-concrete terms; (3) for

abstract terms no image accompanied the typographical vision. Here we

have the superposition of two types: the one natural, and of primitive

formation (concrete type), the other acquired, and of secondary formation

(typographical visual type).

In short,—in many minds the existence of the concept is associated with a

clear vision of the printed word and nothing beyond it.

3. AUDITORY TYPE.—In its pure form this seems to be rare. It consists in

having in mind nothing but signs (auditory images) unaccompanied either

by the vision of printed words or by concrete images. Possibly it may

preponderate among orators and preachers; of this I have no documentary

evidence. Musicians do not appear to belong to this type.

One very clear and complete case of the kind I have, however,

encountered. This was a polyglot physician known as the author of several

works, who for many years had lived among books and manuscripts. He has

no trace of typographical vision, but all words “sound in his ear.” He

can neither read nor compose without articulating; as the interest of his

book or work grows upon him he speaks aloud—“He must hear himself.” In

his dreams there are few or no visual images; he hears his voice and that

of his interlocutors: “His dreams are auditory.” None of my words, even

when semi-concrete, evoked visual images.

In most cases the auditory type is not clear. For very general terms the

heard word alone exists, but in proportion as the concrete is approached,

the sound is accompanied by an image; thus returning upon our former type.

It is worth while to note that the term _flatus vocis_ “_nomina_,” first

employed in the Middle Ages and which has since become the formula of

Nominalism, seems by its nature to indicate that it was originally

invented by persons who belonged to the auditory type, and I may even

hazard an hypothesis. The typographical visual type did not exist

(printing not being invented); it is true that a substitute might have

existed in the _graphic_ visual type (reading of manuscripts). But

considering that in the Middle Ages instruction was essentially oral,

that learning came rather through listening than by reading, that the

oratorical jousts and arguments were daily and interminable, it is

undeniable that the conditions for developing the auditory type were

highly favorable here.

I need hardly say that the three types described above are rarely met

with in the pure and complete form. As a rule a mixed type prevails: a

concrete image for certain words, and typographical vision, or auditory

images, for others. To sum up: all cases seem to be capable of reduction

to the following: (1) The word heard; beyond this, _nil_ (we shall

subsequently have to examine this “nothing”); (2) typographical vision

alone; (3) the same, accompanied by a concrete image; (4) the word heard,

accompanied invariably by a concrete image.

4. Prior to the commencement of this inquiry I felt much hesitation on

one point: should one in questioning use general _words_ or general

_propositions_? I decided in favor of words because these are brief,

simple, isolated, and undisguised, and have the advantage of being

understood directly, while they in no way suggest to the subject what

line he is to follow.

I still however felt scruples in the matter. Was not the investigation

as conducted on these lines a little artificial? In point of fact,

general terms most frequently occur as members of a phrase, co-operating

with others, and connected with them by certain relations. I therefore

recommenced my inquiry, using the same method, but replacing words by

phrases. The general propositions employed are purposely trite, to avoid

contradiction, and to ascertain the immediate mental state. They were as

follows:

Cause invariably precedes effect.—Infinity has several meanings.—Is Space

infinite?—Has Time any limits?—Law is a necessary relation.—I need not

enlarge upon the results: they are _precisely the same_ as for words. In

every case, and for each person, there is one predominating word which

absorbs all the content of the phrase, and is a substitute for it. On

this the instantaneous mental operation is concentrated.

If of the concrete type, the subject sees images. In the second phrase,

e. g., everything converges on the word _infinity_. Replies: Sensation

of obscurity and depth, vague luminous circles, a sort of cupola, a

never-receding horizon, etc. If a typographic visualist, the printed

sentence is seen less clearly than the simple words: “in minute

characters; no capitals”; some persons glimpse it rapidly: others see

only “the principal word printed.”

For the pure auditory type, the answer is always very simple. “I hear the

sentence, I see absolutely nothing.”

The new method therefore simply confirms the previous observations, with

no variations. This identity of result seems to me to militate against

a distinction admitted by many authors. In the classical treatises a

distinction is made between “necessary ideas” and “necessary truths”

(I use their terms uncritically), i. e., general concepts and general

propositions. Example: cause, principle of causality. In my opinion

there is merely a difference of form between the two positions, the one

psychological, the other logical. A concept is a judgment in a state

of envelopment, or of result. The proposition is a word in the state

of development. The difference is not material, but formal; it is the

passage from synthesis to analysis.

I thought that after an interval of two years it might be interesting

to repeat the same inquiry on the same people; but the results were

not encouraging in this direction. Some, remembering the previous

investigation, declared that “they felt themselves influenced

beforehand.” Others, who had a more vague recollection (perhaps because

they did not understand the object of the inquiry) gave answers analogous

to their former replies. In short, notwithstanding the lapse of time, and

change of circumstances, each seemed to be consistent with his former

self.

I must admit that in the preceding research the psychological nature

of the concepts was studied under a particular aspect. This objection

was made at the London Psychological Congress[84] by the President,

Professor Sidgwick, whose remarks may be summarised as follows:

First, Professor Sidgwick believes that the act of suddenly calling

attention to a word, in a person not accustomed to introspective

observation, evokes a response which does not exactly correspond to

the state ordinarily aroused by such words. In his own particular case

he has found that the images evoked (usually visual) were extremely

feeble, but that when he dwelt upon them they were enlivened. Secondly,

the images vary a great deal according to the terms employed; for

example, when he is occupied with mathematical and logical trains of

thought, he sees only the printed words. If he is engaged upon the

subject of political economy, the general terms sometimes have for their

concomitants extremely fantastic images: like _value_, for instance,

which is accompanied by the indistinct and fragmentary image of a man

placing something upon the pan of a balance. Thirdly, when for such words

as _infinity_, _relation_, etc., the subject answers _nothing_, the only

conclusion justified is that the subject is incapable of describing the

confused elements which exist in his consciousness. Fourthly, Professor

Sidgwick’s own experience points to the conclusion that my types may

succeed each other in the same person.

On this last point—the co-existence of several modes of conception in

the same person—I am quite in agreement with Professor Sidgwick, and my

own data, drawn up from personal observations, would provide me with

sufficient evidence. At the same time the object of my investigation

was not to determine the manner in which each individual conceives,

but the forms under which men as a whole think of concepts. Nor did

I profess to follow the work of the mind when it resolves its general

ideas into concretes, when it makes coin out of its bank-notes, but only

to seize the subjacent labor that accompanies the current and facile

use of general terms, in speaking, listening, reading or writing. No

doubt it would be advisable to treat the subject in another manner by

studying—no longer the momentary state that corresponds with the presence

of the concept in consciousness—but the stable organised turn of mind

due to a long habit of dealing with concepts. To this end it would be

desirable more especially to question mathematicians and metaphysicians.

My data are neither numerous nor clear enough to permit of my hazarding

any dictum on this subject. Some mathematicians have told me that they

_invariably_ require a figured representation, a construction, and

that even when these are considered as purely fictitious their support

is indispensable to the train of reasoning. _Contra_ those who think

geometrically, there are others who think algebraically, eliminating all

configuration, or construction, and proceeding by simple analysis with

the aid of signs: which (with the necessary corrections and descriptions)

would bring the first under the concrete, and the second under the

audito-motor type. Among metaphysicians the typographical visual type

seems largely to predominate. One (who is well known) belongs to the pure

auditory type. All this, however, is inadequate; the investigation would

have to be followed out, by and upon others.

A young Russian doctor, M. Adam Wizel, who was interested in the subject,

put the same questions (following the method indicated above) to persons

in the hypnotic state. Admitting the unconscious mental activities

to preponderate in this state he asked whether by this procedure it

would not be possible to penetrate farther into the unknown substrate

of consciousness. His experiments were undertaken at the Salpêtrière,

in Charcot’s clinique, upon six women—hysterics of the first order.

The subjects were first put into a state of somnambulism, then after a

preliminary explanation were questioned, as above. After getting the

answers Wizel ordered the subjects to forget all that had happened, and

then woke them. He now began again in the waking state, asking the same

questions, so that he was able to compare the answers given successively

in the two cases. They are nearly always clearer and more explicit during

somnambulism than during the waking state, as may be judged by the

following example (taken from the third observation):

QUESTIONS SOMNAMBULISM WAKING STATE

Dog: A big grey animal Nothing

Form: A red cardboard head Nothing

Law: A tribunal Nothing

Justice: A magistrate State of justice

Number: Figure 12 in white The number of a note (?)

Color: Green Blue

Where the replies are concrete in the two cases I note a tolerable

analogy between them. M. Wizel (who eliminated all doubtful cases,

and any accompanied by crises) never encountered the typographical

visual type, nor the pure auditory type, in his experiments. His

six hysterics belong to the concrete type, with the predominance of

_visual_ images—much more rarely of motor images, provoked by the word

“force.” The answer “nothing” is very frequent; less so, however, during

somnambulism than during the waking state.

II.

We now reach the most obscure and difficult part of our subject. Among

the nine hundred and odd replies collected, the one most frequently met

with is “nothing.” There is no observation in which it does not occur

at least once: in the majority of cases it is found one, two, three,

four, or more times. If I take the word _cause_, the formula “I have no

representation,” forms fifty-three per cent. of the total of answers

collected; the rest saw the printed word or some concrete image; e. g.,

a stone falling, horses drawing, or other simulacra, of which several

have already been enumerated. It is the same with all the other highly

abstract terms (time, infinity, etc.). So that to return to the question

which was to be the _exclusive_ object of our investigation,—“Is the

general idea when thought, read, or heard, accompanied by anything in

consciousness?”—we may reply, an image, a typographical vision, or

nothing. We must now inquire, what this _nothing_ is, for it must be

something.

We are face to face with the problem which the pure Nominalists attacked,

when they took this _nil_ in its proper sense. Were there indeed any

who really pretended that we could have in mind words, and words

only—nothing besides? This is a historical problem into which it is

useless for us to enter. It is possible that some may have pushed their

reaction against the extravagances of realism even to this point, but

the thesis is totally insupportable; for at that rate there would be no

difference between a general term, and a word of any unknown language:

the latter is the pure _flatus vocis_, a sound that evokes nothing. If,

on the other hand, by word we mean sign, everything changes, since the

sign implies and envelops something. Such appears to me to be the true

interpretation.[85]

So that for the cases which alone concern us for the moment, i. e.,

those in which the reply was “Nothing,” there are two elements, the

one existing in consciousness (word heard or auditory image), the

other subconscious, but not therefore invalid and inaccurate. Hence we

must penetrate into the obscure region of the unconscious, in order to

apprehend the something which gives to the word its signification, its

life, its power of substitution.

Leibnitz wrote: “Most frequently, e. g., in any prolonged analysis, we

have no simultaneous intuition of all the characteristics or attributes

of a thing: in their place we use signs. In actually thinking, we are

accustomed to omit the explanation of these signs by reference to what

they signify—knowing or believing that we have this explanation in our

power: but we do not judge the application, or explanation, of the words

to be positively necessary.... I have termed this method of thinking,

blind or symbolic. We employ it in algebra, in arithmetic, and in fact

universally:” which is equivalent to saying that potential knowledge

is stored up beneath the general or abstract terms; nor should we be

surprised at finding this doctrine in the man who first introduced the

idea of the unconscious into philosophy.

To determine the rôle of this inevitably active, albeit silent, factor

is a difficult enterprise, and one that is necessarily inaccurate,—since

it amounts to the translation of obscure and enveloped states into the

clear and analytical language of consciousness. The simplest procedure is

to examine how we arrive at the comprehension of general terms.[86] Set

a page of a philosophical work before the eyes of a novice or of a man

wholly ignorant of the subject. He understands nothing. The only method

that will render it intelligible is to take the general or abstract

terms one after the other, and translate them into concrete events,

into facts of current experience. This labor demands an hour or two. In

proportion to the progress of the novice, the translation is effected

more quickly; it becomes superfluous for certain terms; and finally but

a few minutes are required for the comprehension of a page. Untrained

minds are often surprised, on reading a sentence consisting of abstract

terms, at understanding each word, and yet not knowing what the whole

means. This signifies that they have not beneath each word potential

knowledge sufficient to establish a connexion or relation between all

the terms, and giving meaning to them. Apart from those who are familiar

with abstraction by natural gift or by habit, it is incontestable that to

the vast majority the reading of an abstract page is a slow and painful

and very fatiguing process. This is because each word exacts an act of

attention, an effort, which corresponds to labor in the unconscious or

subconscious regions. When this labor becomes useless, and we think, or

appear to think, by signs alone all goes rapidly and easily.

In short, we learn to understand a concept as we learn to walk, dance,

fence, or play a musical instrument: it is a habit, i. e., an organised

memory. General terms cover an organised, latent knowledge which is the

hidden capital without which we should be in a state of bankruptcy,

manipulating false money or paper of no value. General ideas are habits

in the intellectual order. Suppression of effort corresponds with

perfected habit; as again with perfect comprehension.

What occurs each time we have in consciousness merely the general

term, is only a particular case of a very common psychological fact:

as follows:—The useful work is carried on below consciousness, and

above its surface only results, indications, or signs appear. The facts

enumerated above are all taken from motor activity. Their equivalents

abound in the domain of feeling. The “causeless” states of joy or sorrow,

which are frequent in the sound man, and still more in the invalid, are

only the translation into consciousness of ignored organic dispositions

operating in obscurity. What gives intensity and duration to our passions

is not the consciousness we have of them, but the depth of the roots

by which they plunge into our being, and are organised in our viscera,

and subsequently in our brain. They are no more than the expression

of our constitution, permanent, or momentary. We might run over the

whole province of psychology, with variations on the same theme. I do

not propose to do so here, but would simply recall that every state

of consciousness whatsoever (percept, image, idea, feeling, passion,

volition) has its substrate; that the concept reduced to the bare word

is but another case of the same kind, and in no wise peculiar: that

to believe that there is nothing more than the word, because it alone

exists in consciousness, is to seize only the superficial and visible

part of the event,—perhaps, all things considered, the least part. This

unconscious substratum, this organised and potential knowledge, gives

not merely value, but an actual denotation to the word,—like harmonics

superadded to the fundamental note.

To conclude: we think not with words in the strict sense (_flatus vocis_)

but with signs. Symbolic thought, which is a purely verbal operation, is

sustained, co-ordinated, vivified, by potential knowledge and unconscious

travail. To this it must be added that potential knowledge is a genus,

of which the concept is only a species. All memory can be reduced to

latent knowledge, organised, susceptible of revival, but all memory is

not material for concepts. The man who knows many languages even when

not speaking them, the naturalist capable of identifying millions of

specimens while not classifying them, have a very extended potential

knowledge, but it is all concrete. The potential knowledge which

underlies concepts consists in a sum of characters, qualities, extracts,

which are the less numerous in proportion as the concept approximates to

pure symbolism: in other terms what underlies the concept is an abstract

memory, a memory for abstracts.

In my opinion, a large measure of the obscurities and dissensions

which prevail as to the nature of concepts, arises from the fact that

the rôle of unconscious activity has for centuries been misunderstood

or forgotten,—psychology having confined itself exclusively to

consciousness: and while its action is universally admitted to-day for

all other manifestations of mental life—instincts, percepts, feelings,

volition, etc.—it is still excluded from the domain of concepts. The

whole of the foregoing discussion is an essay towards its reintegration.

Need we add that the opinion adopted as to the nature of the unconscious

matters little in the present connexion? On this point there are, we

know, two principal hypotheses. According to the one it is a purely

physiological event, and can be reduced to unconscious cerebration.

According to the other, the unconscious is still a psychical fact;

whether it be an affective rather than a representative state, or a

complex of little, scattered consciousnesses, isolated, evanescent, with

no linkage to the self, or, again, an organisation or sequence of states,

which forms another current coexistent with that of clear consciousness.

These theories, and others which I omit, have nothing to do with our

purpose. It is sufficient to recognise unconscious activity as a fact,

without any explanation, and this position would seem to be incontestable.

We have seen that abstraction, in proportion as it ascends and

strengthens, separates itself more and more from the image, until

finally, at the moment of pure symbolism, the separation becomes

antagonism. This is because there is fundamentally, and from the outset,

an opposition of nature and procedure between the two. The ideal of

the image is an ever-growing complexity, the ideal of abstraction an

ever-growing simplification, since the one is formed by addition, the

other by subtraction.

To the man who is gifted with a rich internal vision, the shape of

people, of monuments, of landscapes, surges up clearly and well defined:

under the influence of attention, and with time, details are added,—the

representation completes itself, and approaches more and more completely

to the reality. So too with internal audition: witness the musician who

hears ideally every detail of a symphony.

The contrary holds for abstraction. “There is,” says Cournot, “an

analysis which separates objects, and an analysis which distinguishes

without isolating them. The use of the refracting prism is an instance of

the analysis which separates or isolates. If, instead of isolating the

rays so as to cause them to describe different trajectories, they are

made to traverse certain media which have the property of extinguishing a

definite color, we are able to distinguish without isolating.”[87]

Abstraction belongs to this last type, with intervention of the

process described by Cournot. Attention brings a feature into relief;

inattention, and voluntary inhibition, act as extinguishers to the other

characteristics.

Let us pass from theory to practice. This antagonism is of current

observation, almost a banality, whenever men of imagination are

confronted with abstract thinkers. We must of course exclude those who

by a rare gift of nature (Goethe), or by the artifice of education, are

capable of handling the image and concept alternately.

Let us take the artists as type of the imaginative thinker: the novelist,

poet, sculptor, painter, musician, etc. Each dreams of an organic,

living work, a _complex_. Some with words, others with forms, others

with sounds; realists with the aid of minute detail, classics by means

of general sketches; all make for the same end. Music again, which from

its nature seems a thing apart, is an architecture of sounds of amazing

complexity, often exciting contradictory states of mind.

Among abstract thinkers (theorists, scientists) the tendency is always

towards unity, law, generalities—towards _simplification_: by what

is fundamental and essential, if the man be genuine; by shifting and

accidental features, if he is a charlatan. The mathematician and the pure

metaphysician have usually a distaste for facts, for multiplicity of

detail. A writer whose name has escaped me says: “Every scientist smells

of the cadaver.” This is our thesis, under the form of an image. Abstract

thought is a cadaver. It would be more just, though less picturesque,

to say a skeleton; for scientific abstraction is the bony framework of

phenomena.

The antagonism between the image and the idea is thus fundamentally

that of the whole and the part. It is impossible to be at the same

time an abstract thinker and an imaginative thinker, because one

cannot simultaneously think the whole and the part, the group and the

fraction; and these two habits of mind while not absolutely exclusive are

antagonistic.

* * * * *

In conclusion, have we general ideas, or merely general terms? It must

first be remarked that the expressions, “general ideas or notions,”

“concepts,” are equivocal or rather multivocal. We have seen that

concepts differ widely in their psychological nature according to their

degree, having but one characteristic in common—that of being extracts.

It is therefore chimerical to attempt to include them all under a single

definition. To take the highest only, as most frequently debated, some

say, “There are no general ideas but only general terms.” To others the

general idea is only an indefinite series of particular ideas, or “a

particular idea that the mind proposes as the first stake in a forward

march.”[88] To others it is a system of tendencies accompanied or not by

the possibility of images.[89] For my own part I prefer the formula of

Höffding[90]: “General ideas exist therefore in the sense that we are

able to concentrate the attention on certain elements of the individual

idea, so that a weaker light falls on the other elements.”

This is the sole mode of existence that can be legitimately conceded to

them.

In regard to the higher concepts we have endeavored to show that they

have their distinctive psychological nature: on the one hand a clear

and conscious element which is always the word, and sometimes in

addition the fragmentary image; on the other an obscure and unconscious

factor,—without which, nevertheless, symbolic thought is only a mechanism

turning in the air, and producing naught but phantoms.

CHAPTER V.

EVOLUTION OF THE PRINCIPAL CONCEPTS.

After this general study of the nature of the most elevated forms of

abstraction, we must take the principal concepts one by one, and retrace

their evolution in outline. Let us once more note that we are concerned

with pure psychology, and are to eliminate all that depends on the

theory of knowledge and other transcendental speculations. As regards

the _first_ origin of our notions of time, space, cause, etc., each may

adopt the opinion that pleases him. Whether we admit the hypothesis of

_à priori_ forms of the mind (Kant), or that of an innate sense acquired

by repetition of experience in the species, and fixed by heredity in

the course of centuries (Herbert Spencer), or any other whatsoever—it

is clear that the appearance of these concepts, and the data of their

evolution, depend on experimental conditions, and consequently fall

within our province. Accordingly it is with their empirical genesis, and

development through experience, that we are concerned—and with that alone.

SECTION I. CONCEPT OF NUMBER.

The lower phases of this concept are already known to us. We have

traversed them in considering numeration, in brutes, children, and

aborigines. And here we return to it finally under its higher aspects.

At the outset, counting was, as we found, merely the perception of a

plurality; abstraction being practically at zero. Later on a rudiment of

numeration appeared, under a practical concrete form: we have perception

plus the word—a poor auxiliary, whose part is so insignificant as to

be mostly negligible. We noted the different stages of this concrete

abstract period, marked by the increasing importance of the word.

Finally we arrived at the point at which it is the prime and almost

the only factor. Number under its abstract form, as it results, from a

long elaboration, consists in a collection of unities that are, or are

reputed, similar. We have therefore first to examine how the idea of

unity is formed. Next by what mental operation the sequence of numbers is

constituted, lastly what is the part played by the sign.

I. To common sense nothing appears more easy than to explain how the idea

of unity is formed. I see a man, a tree, a house; I hear a sound; I touch

an object; I smell an odor, and so on: and I distinguish this single

state from a plurality of sensations. John Stuart Mill seems to admit

that number (at least in its simplest forms) is a quality of things that

we perceive, as white, black, roundness, hardness: there is a distinct

and special state of consciousness corresponding to one, two, three, etc.

Even if we admit this very doubtful thesis, we should arrive at last only

at _perceived_ numbers, with which consistent and extended numeration is

impossible. It can only be carried on with homogeneous terms, i. e., such

as are given by abstraction.

The notion of unity must however find its point of departure in

experience, at first under a concrete form; Although it may enter

consciousness by several doors, some psychologists, with no legitimate

reason, have attributed its origin to one definite mode of external, or

even internal, perception which they have chosen to the exclusion of all

others.

For some, it is the primordial sense, _the_ sense _par excellence_;

touch. The child regards as a unity the object which it can hold in its

hand (a ball, a glass), or follow uninterruptedly in all its boundaries.

Wherever his operations are interrupted, where there are breaks of

surface continuity, he perceives plurality. In other terms unity is the

continuous, plurality is the discontinuous. Numerous observations prove

that children actually have a far more exact and precocious notion of

continuous quantity (extension), than of discontinuous, discrete quantity

(number).[91]

For others, it is sight, for which all that was said above may obviously

be repeated. The retina replaces the cutaneous surface: an image

clearly perceived without discontinuity is the unity; the perception of

simultaneous images leaving intermediate lacunæ in the field of vision,

gives plurality.

The same may be said of the acoustic sensations. Preyer, in a work

on “Arithmogenesis,” claims that “hearing takes first rank in the

acquisition of the concept of number.” Number must be felt before it is

thought. Ideas of number and of addition have to be acquired, and this,

according to him, takes place in the child when it hears and compares

sounds. Subsequently, touch and sight complete this first outline. It

is known that Leibnitz assimilated music to an unconscious arithmetic.

Preyer reverses the proposition and says: _Arithmetica est exercitium

musicum occultum nescientis se sonos comparare animi._[92]

As against those who seek the origin of the idea of unity in external

events, others attribute it to internal experience.

Thus it has been maintained that consciousness of the ego as a monad

which knows itself, is the prototype of arithmetical unity. Obviously

this assertion is open to numerous objections. To wit, the late formation

of the notion of the ego, the fruit of reflexion; its instability,—still

more, this unity, like all the preceding, is concrete, complex; it is a

composite unity.

The thesis of W. James is very superior: “Number seems to signify

primarily the strokes of our attention in discriminating things. These

strokes remain in the memory in groups, large or small, and the groups

can be compared. The discrimination is, as we know, psychologically

facilitated by the mobility of the thing as a total.... A globe is one if

undivided; two, if composed of hemispheres. A sand heap is one thing, or

twenty thousand things, as we may choose to count it.”[93] This reduction

to acts of attention brings us back definitely to the essential and

fundamental conditions of abstraction.

Save this last, the hypotheses enumerated (and internal sensation

might also have been invoked; e. g., a localised pain as compared with

several scattered pains) give only percepts or images, i. e., the raw

material of abstract unity. This is itself a subjective notion. We said

above (Chapter II) that the question whether consciousness starts from

the general or the particular is a misstatement, because it applies

to the mind which is in process of formation, categories valid only

for the adult intelligence. So here. At the outset there is no clear

perception of primary unity and subsequent plurality, or _vice versa_:

neither observation nor reasoning justifies an affirmation. There is a

confused, indefinite state, whence issues the antithesis of continuous

and discontinuous, the primitive equivalents of unity and plurality.

It took centuries to arrive at the precise notion of abstract unity as

it exists in the minds of the first mathematicians, and this notion is

the result of a _decomposition_, not of any direct and immediate act

of postulation. It was necessary to decompose an object or group into

its constituent parts, which are or appear to be irreducible. Then a

new synthesis of these parts was required to reconstitute the whole, in

order that the notion of relation between unity and plurality should be

perceived clearly. It cannot be doubted that for the lesser numbers two,

three, four, the successive perception of each separate object, and then

of the objects apprehended together at a single glance, has aided the

work of the mind in the conception of this relation. We have seen that

many human races never passed beyond this phase. The abstract notion of

unity is that of the indivisible (provisory). It is this abstract quality

of the indivisible, fixed by a word, that gives us the scientific idea of

unity as opposed to the vulgar notion. Perceived unity is a concrete,

conceived unity is a quality, an abstract; and in one sense it may be

said that unity, and consequently all abstract number, is a creation of

the mind. It results like all abstraction from analysis—dissociation.

Like all abstraction, it has an ideal existence; yet this in no way

prevents it from being an instrument of marvellous utility.

II. It is owing to this that the sequence of numbers, homogeneous

in material, can be constituted; for the identity of unities is the

sole condition in virtue of which they can be counted, and the scant

numerations of the concrete-abstract period transcended. The sequence

is constituted by an invariable process of construction, which may be

reduced to addition or subtraction. “Thus the number 2, simplest of

all numbers, is a construction in virtue of which unity is added to

itself; the number 3 is a construction in virtue of which unity is

added to the number 2, and so on in order. If numbers are composed by

successively adding unity to itself, or to other numbers already formed

by the same process, they are decomposed by withdrawing unity from the

previously constructed sums; and thus, to decompose is again to compose

other numbers. For example, if 3 is 2 + 1, it is also 4 - 1. Addition

and subtraction are two inverse operations whose results are mutually

exclusive: they are the sole primitive numerical functions.”[94]

The simplicity and solidity of this process result from its being always

identical with itself, and although the series of numbers is unlimited,

some one term of the sequence is rigorously determined, because it can

always be brought back to its point of departure, unity. In this labor of

construction by continuous repetition, two psychological facts are to be

noted:

1. No sooner is unity passed, in the elaboration of numbers, than

intuition fails altogether. Directly we reach 5, 6, 7, etc, (the limit

varies with the individual), objects can no longer be perceived or

represented together: there is now no more in consciousness than the

sign, the substitute for the absent intuition: each number becomes a sum

of unities fixed by a name.

2. For our unity-type we substitute higher unities, which admit of

simplification. Thus in the predominating decimal system, ten and a

hundred are unities ten and a hundred times larger than unity, properly

so called. They may be of any given magnitude: the Hindus, whose

exuberant imagination is well known, invented the _koti_, equivalent

to four billions three hundred and twenty-eight millions of years, for

calculating the life of their gods; each _koti_ represents a single day

of the divine life.[95]

Inversely, we may consider the unity-type as a sum of identical parts,

and represent 1 = 10/10 or 100/100, etc. A tenth, a hundredth, are

unities ten times, a hundred times, smaller than unity properly so

called, but they obey the same laws in the formation of fractional

numbers.

It is well for the psychologist to note the privileged position of

what we term the unity-type, or simply 1. It originates in experience,

because unity, even when concrete, and apprehended by gross perception,

appears as a primitive element, special and irreducible. So long as the

mind confines itself to perceiving or imagining, there is in the passage

from one object to two, three, or four objects, or inversely in the

passage from four objects to three, two, or only one, an augmentation or

diminution. But below unity in the first case, and above unity in the

second, there is no longer any mental representation; unity seems to

border on nonentity and to be an absolute beginning.

From this privileged point the mind can follow two opposite directions,

by an identical movement: the one towards the infinitely great, with

constant augmentation; the other towards the infinitely small, with

constant diminution—but in one sense or the other, infinity is a never

exhausted possibility. Here we reach the much disputed question of

infinite number: psychology is not concerned with this. For some,

infinite number has an _actual_ existence. For others, it only exists

potentially, i. e., as an intellectual operation which may, as was said

above, add or subtract, without end or intermission.[96]

III. The importance of signs, as the instruments of abstraction

and generalisation, is nowhere so well shown as in their multiple

applications to discrete or continuous quantity. The history of the

mathematical sciences is in part that of the invention, and use of

symbols of increasing complexity, whose efficacy is clearly manifested

in their theoretical or practical results. In the first place, words

were substituted for the things that were held to be numerable; next,

particular signs, or figures; later still, with the invention of algebra,

letters took the place of figures, or at any rate assumed their function

and part in the problem to be solved; later still, the consideration of

geometrical figures was replaced by that of their equations; finally,

the use of new symbols corresponded with calculations for infinitesimal

quantities, negative quantities, and imaginary numbers.

These symbols are such a powerful auxiliary to the labor of the

mathematicians that those among them who affect philosophy have gladly

discoursed upon their nature and intrinsic value. They seem to be divided

into two camps.

One faction attribute reality to the symbols, or at least incline that

way. It is the introduction of the _nomina numina_ into mathematics. They

maintain that these pretended conventions are only the expression of

necessary relations which the mind is obliged, on account of their ideal

nature, to represent by arbitrary signs, but which are not invented by

caprice, or by the necessity of the individual mind—since this contents

itself with laying hold of that which is offered by the nature of the

things. Do we not see moreover that the labor accomplished by their aid

is, with necessary modifications, applicable to reality?

To the other, symbols are but means, instruments, stratagems. They mock

at those who “look upon relations once symbolised as things which have

in themselves an _à priori_ scientific content, as idols, which we

supplicate to reveal themselves” (Renouvier). Signs, whatever they may

be, are nothing more than conventions: negative quantities represent

a change in the direction of thought. Imaginary numbers “represent

important relations under a simple and abridged form.” Symbols are an

aid in surmounting difficulties, as, empirically, the lever and its

developments serve for the lifting of weights. “It is not calculation,”

said Poinsot, “that is the secret of this art which teaches us to

discover; but the attentive consideration of things, wherein the

intellect seeks above all to form an idea of them, endeavoring by

_analysis_ properly so called to decompose them into other more simple

ideas, and to review them again subsequently as if they had been formed

by the union of those simpler things of which it had full knowledge.”[97]

In sum: numbers consist in a series of acts of intellectual apprehension,

susceptible of different directions, and of almost unlimited

applications. They serve for comparison, for measurement, for putting

order into a variety of things. If we compare now the two extremes,—viz.,

the first attempt at infantine numeration and the highest numerical

inventions of the mathematician,—we must recognise the notion of

number to be a fine example of the complete evolution of the faculty

of abstraction, as applied to a particular case, the principal stages

of which we have been able to note in bringing out the ever-increasing

importance of signs.