It would be easy to add quotations from other writers to the same effect as the above;[98] but these may be held sufficient to give material for the first stage of my criticism, which is of a purely technical character. I affirm that all writers who thus take their stand upon the distinctively human faculty of predication are taking their stand at the wrong place. In other words, without at present disputing whether we have to do with a distinction of kind or of degree, I say, and say confidently, that the distinction in question—_i.e._ between animal and human intelligence—may be easily proved to occur further back than at the faculty of predication, or the forming of a proposition. The distinction occurs at the faculty of denomination, or the bestowing of a name, known as such. “The simplest element of thought” is _not_ a “_judgment_:” the simplest element of thought is a _concept_. That this is the case admits of being easily demonstrated in several different ways. In the first place, it is evident that there could be no judgments without concepts, just as there could be no propositions without terms. A judgment is the result of a comparison of concepts, and this is the reason why it can only find expression in a proposition, which sets forth the relation between the concepts by bringing into apposition their corresponding terms. Judgments, therefore, are _compounds_ of thought: the _elements_ are concepts. In the second place, given the power of conceiving, and the germ of judgment is implied, though not expanded into the blossom of formal predication. For whenever we bestow a name we are implicitly judging that the thing to which we apply the name presents the attributes connoted by that name, and thus we are virtually predicating the fact. For example, when I call a man a “Negro,” the very term itself affirms blackness as the distinctive quality of that individual—just as does the equivalent nursery term, “Black-man.” To utter the name Negro, therefore, or the name Black-man, is to form and pronounce at least two judgments touching an individual object of sensuous perception—to wit, that it is a man, and that he is black. The judgments so formed and pronounced are doubtless not so explicit as is the case when both subject and predicate are associated in the full proposition—“A negro is black;” but in the single term Negro, or Black-man, both these elements were already present, and _must_ have been so if the name were in any degree at all conceptual—_i.e._ _denominative_ as distinguished from _denotative_. In the illustration “Negro,” or “Black-man,” it so happens that the connotation of the name is directly given by the etymology of the name; but this circumstance is immaterial. Whether or not the etymology of a connotative name happens to fit the particular subject to which it is applied, the same kind of classificatory judgment is required for any appropriate application of the same. If,