It may be said that the generic condensation of experience here indicated implies the formation of general and abstract ideas, and that we cannot in face of the evidence accept Locke’s dictum that abstraction is “an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain to.” Romanes contended[72] that “all the higher animals have general ideas of ‘good-for-eating’ and ‘not-good-for-eating’ quite apart from any particular objects of which either of these qualities happens to be characteristic,” and he quoted with approval Leroy’s statement,[73] that a fox “will see snares when there are none; his imagination, distorted by fear, will produce deceptive shapes, to which he will attach an abstract notion of danger.” According to such views animals form concepts; and concepts belong to the sphere of rational thought. It is not my intention to enter at length into the refinements of psychological distinction. Many psychologists, however, seek to distinguish between, on the one hand, the predominance by natural emphasis, of certain qualities, such as that of being suitable for food, and, on the other hand, the intentional isolation of these qualities for the purposes of thought and rational explanation. Abstraction they regard as a deliberate process applied with rational intent to the material afforded by experience and reflection. Generalization, too, they regard as deliberate, and carried out with like intent. The result is not merely a composite or generic product, but something more subtle and less dependent on sense. “All trees hitherto seen by me,” said Noiré, “leave in my imagination a mixed image, a kind of ideal presentation of a tree. Quite different is my concept, which is never an image.” The concept “tree” is a deliberate synthesis of abstract qualities intentionally isolated, and recombined in accordance with the general relationships which subsist between them. If we accept this distinction, if we regard abstraction and generalization as intentional mental processes carried out with the rational intent of discovering the relationships of phenomena with the object of explaining them and recombining their essential features in an ideal scheme of thought, we shall probably admit, with John Locke, that these are excellencies which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain to. But we shall none the less see that the predominance of certain salient features in experience by reiterated emphasis in association with natural needs, and the development of generic in place of merely particular re-presentations will afford the appropriate material for abstraction on the one hand, and generalization on the other. Intelligence supplies the embryonic mental structures from which, under the quickening influence of a rational purpose, abstract and general ideas may be evolved.