But although I hold this to be the true explanation of the _apparent_ independence of predication and introspection in all cases of highly abstract thought, I am firmly convinced that in all cases where those lower orders of ideation to which I have so often referred as receptual and pre-conceptual are concerned, the independence is not only _apparent_, but _real_. This, indeed, I have already proved _must_ be the case with the pre-conceptual propositions of a young child, inasmuch as such propositions are then made in the absence of self-consciousness, or of the necessary condition to their being _in any degree_ introspective. But the point now is, that even in the adult human mind non-conceptual predication is habitual, and that, in cases where only receptual ideation is concerned, predication of this kind need _never have been_ conceptual. For, as Mill very truly says, “it will be admitted that, by asserting the proposition, we wish to communicate information of that physical fact (namely, that the summit of Chimborazo is white), and are not thinking of the names, except as the necessary means of making that communication. The meaning of the proposition, therefore, is that the individual thing denoted by the subject has the attributes connoted by the predicate.”[141] Now, if it is thus true that even in ordinary predication we may not require to take conceptual cognizance of the matter predicated—having to do only with the apposition of names immediately suggested by association,—the ideation concerned becomes so closely affiliated with that which is expressed in the lower levels of sign-making, that even if the connecting links were not supplied by the growing child, no one would be justified, on psychological grounds alone, in alleging any difference of kind between one level and another. The object of all sign-making is primarily that of communication, and from our study of the lower animals we know that communication first has to do exclusively with recepts, while from our study of the growing child we know that it is the signs used in the communication of recepts which first lead to the formation of concepts. For concepts are first of all named recepts, known as such; and we have seen in previous chapters that this kind of knowledge (_i.e._ of names as names) is rendered possible by introspection, which, in turn is reached by the naming of self as an agent. But even after the power of conceptual introspection has been fully reached, demand is not always made upon it for the communication of merely receptual knowledge; and therefore it is that not every proposition requires to be introspectively contemplated as such before it can be made. Given the power of denotative nomination on the one hand, and the power of even the lowest degree of connotative nomination on the other, and all the conditions are furnished to the formation of non-conceptual statements, which differ from true