not a jot the less capable of inferring, concluding, and of all kind of reasoning than were the Greeks and Latins.” This shrewd analysis by Hobbes is justly said by Mill to be “the only analysis of a proposition which is rigorously true of all propositions without exception;” and Professor Max Müller says of it, “Hobbes, though utterly ignorant of the historical antecedents of language, agrees with us in the most remarkable manner.”[102] Thus, then, upon the whole, and without further treatment, it may be concluded that whether we look to its simplest manifestations or to its most complex, we must alike conclude that it is the faculty of conception, not that of judgment—the faculty of denomination, not that of predication—which we have to regard as “the simplest element of thought.” Of course, if it were said that these two faculties are one in kind—that in order to conceive we must judge, and in order to name we must predicate—I should have no objection to offer. All I am at present engaged upon is to make it clear that the distinction between man and brute in respect of the Logos must be drawn at the place where this distinction first obtains; and this place is where judgment is concerned with conception, or with the bestowing of names in the sense previously explained as _denominative_. The subsequent working up of names into propositions is merely a further exhibition of the self-same faculty. It is as true of judgment when displayed in denomination as it is of judgment when displayed in predication, that “it is not itself a modified imagination, because the imaginations which may give rise to it persist unmodified in the mind side by side with it.” For, as we have seen, the act of denominating (as distinguished from denotating) is in and of itself an act of predicating. When a naturalist bestows a name upon a new species of plant or animal, he has _judged_ a resemblance and _predicates_ a fact—_i.e._ that the hitherto unnamed form belongs to certain _genus_ or _kind_. And so it is with all other names when conceptually bestowed, because everywhere such names are expressions of conceptual _classification_—the bringing together of like things, or the separation of unlike. In short, all names which present any conceptual meaning are in themselves condensed propositions, or “material predications;” and only as such can they afterwards become _terms_, _i.e._ constitute the essential elements of any more extended proposition, or “formal predication.” Therefore it is the faculty of naming wherein is first displayed—and, according to the doctrine of Nominalism, _whereby is first attained_—that great and distinctive characteristic of the human mind which Mr. Mivart and those who think with him have in view; and, unless we espouse the doctrine of Realism—which neither these nor any other psychologists with whom I have to do are likely nowadays to countenance,—it is plain that “the simplest element of thought” is a concept.