Therefore, if any one were to maintain that the difference between the intelligence which can discern, and one which cannot discern, the likeness of a dog in the image or the picture of a dog, is a difference of kind, consistency should lead him to draw a similar distinction between the intelligence which can discern, and one which cannot discern, the likeness of a terrier to a mastiff. But, if so, the intelligence of one parrot would be different in kind from that of another parrot; and the child’s intelligence at one age would differ in kind from the intelligence of that same child when a week or two older—both of which statements would be manifestly absurd. The truth can only be that up to the point where the intelligence of the child surpasses that of the bird they are both in the receptual stage of sign-making; and that the only reason why the child does surpass the bird is not, in the first instance, because the child there suddenly attains the power of conceptual ideation, but because it gradually attains a higher level of receptual ideation. This admits of direct proof from the fact that animals more intelligent than parrots are unquestionably able to recognize sculptured and even pictorial representations: hence there can be no doubt that if talking birds had attained a similar level of intelligence—or if the other and more intelligent animals had been able, like the talking birds, to use denotative signs,—the child would not have parted company with the brute at quite so early a stage of receptual nomenclature.[108] What, then, are we to say about the faculty of judgment in relation to these three stages of ideation—namely, the receptual, pre-conceptual, and conceptual? We can only institute the parallel and consequent distinction between judgment as receptual, pre-conceptual, and conceptual.[109] As now so often stated, the distinguishing features of a judgment as fully displayed in any act of formal predication, are the bringing together in self-conscious thought of two concepts, and the distinguishing of some relation between them as such. Therefore we do not say that a brute judges when, without any self-conscious thought, it brings together certain reminiscences of its past experience in the form of recepts, and translates for us the results of its ideation by the performance of what Mr. Mivart calls “practical inferences.” Therefore, also, if a brute which is able to name each of two recepts separately (as is done by a talking bird), were to name the two recepts simultaneously when thus combined in an act of “practical inference,” although there would then be the outward semblance of a proposition, we should not be strictly right in calling it a proposition. It would, indeed, be the statement of a truth _perceived_; but not the statement of a truth perceived _as true_.[110]