the stages which we are now considering are concerned (_i.e._ the denotative and receptually connotative), I submit that my case is made out. And yet these are really the most important stages to be clear about; for, on account of their having been ignored by nearly all writers who argue that there is a difference of kind between man and brute, the most important—because the initial—stages of transition have been lost sight of, and the fully developed powers of human thought contrasted with their low beginnings in the brute creation, without any attention having been paid to the probable history of their development. Hitherto, so far as I can find, no psychologist has presented clearly the simple question whether the faculty of naming is always and necessarily co-extensive with that of _thinking the names_; and, therefore, the two faculties have been assumed to be one and the same. Yet, as I have shown in an earlier chapter, even in the highest forms of human ideation we habitually use names without waiting to think of them as names—which proves that even in the highest regions of ideation the two faculties are not _necessarily_ coincident.[137] And here I have further shown that, whether we look to the brute or to the human being, we alike find that the one faculty is in its inception _wholly independent_ of the other—that there are connotative names before there are any denominative thoughts, and that these connotative names, when they first occur in brute or child, betoken no further aptitude of ideation than is betokened by those stages in the language of gesture which they everywhere overlap. The named recepts of a parrot cannot be held by my opponents to be true concepts, any more than the indicative gestures of an infant can be held by them to differ in kind from those of a dog. * * * * * I submit, then, that neither as regards the indicative, the denotative, nor the connotative stages of sign-making is it argumentatively possible to allege any difference of kind between animal and human intelligence—apart, I mean, from any evidence of self-consciousness in the latter, or so long as the intelligence of either is moving in what I have called the receptual sphere. Let us, then, next consider what I have called the pre-conceptual stage of ideation, or that higher receptual life of a child which, while surpassing the receptual life of any brute, has not yet attained to the conceptual life of a man.