By an _indicative_ sign I will understand a significant tone or gesture intentionally expressive of a mental state; but yet not in any sense of the word denominative. By a _denotative_ sign I will understand the receptual marking of particular objects, qualities, actions, &c. By a _connotative_ sign I will understand the classificatory attribution of qualities to objects named by the sign, whether such attribution be due to receptual or to conceptual operations of the mind. By a _denominative_ sign I will understand a connotative sign consciously bestowed as such, or with a full conceptual appreciation of its office and purpose as a name. By a _predicative_ sign I will mean a proposition, or the conceptual apposition of two denominative terms, expressive of the speaker’s intention to connote something of the one by means of the other. CHAPTER IX. SPEECH. We are now coming to close quarters with our subject. All the foregoing chapters have been arranged with a view to preparing the way for what is hereafter to follow; and, therefore, as already remarked, I have thus far presented material over which I do not think it is possible that any dispute can arise. But now we come to that particular exhibition of the sign-making faculty which not only appears to be peculiar to man, but which obviously presents so great an advance upon all the lower phases hitherto considered, that it is the place where my opponents have chosen to take their stand. When a man maintains that there is a difference of kind between animal and human intelligence, he naturally feels himself under some obligation to indicate the point where this difference obtains. To say that it obtains with the appearance of language, in the sense of sign-making, is obviously too wide a statement; for, as we have now so fully seen, language, in this widest sense, demonstrably obtains among the lower animals. Consequently, the line must be drawn, not at language or sign-making, but at that particular kind of sign-making which we understand by Speech. Now the distinctive peculiarity of this kind of sign-making—and one, therefore, which does not occur in any other kind—consists in predication, or the using of signs as movable types for the purpose of making propositions. It does not signify whether or not the signs thus used are words. The gestures of Indians and deaf-mutes admit, as we have seen, of being wrought up into a machinery of predication which, for all purposes of practical life, is almost as efficient as speech. The distinction, therefore, resides in the intellectual powers; not in the symbols thereof. So that a man _means_, it matters not by what system of signs he expresses his meaning: the distinction between him and the brute consists in his being able to _mean a proposition_. Now, the kind of mental act whereby a man is thus enabled to mean a proposition is called by psychologists an act of Judgment. Predication, or the making of a proposition, is