These remarks are directed to the comparatively few instances of general ideas which, as a matter of fact, the list of “121 concepts” presents. As already observed, the great majority of these “concepts” exhibit no higher degree of “generality” than belongs to what I have called a “pre-concept,” _i.e._ a “named recept.” But precisely the same considerations apply to both. For, even supposing that a named recept was originally a word used only to designate a “particular” as distinguished from a “generic” idea, obviously it would have stood but a poor chance of surviving as a root unless it had first undergone a sufficient degree of extension to have become what I call receptually connotative. A proper name, for instance, could not, as such, become a root. Not until it had become extended to other persons or things of a like class could it have secured a chance of surviving as a root in the struggle for existence. As a matter of fact, I think it most probable—not only from general considerations, but also from a study of the spontaneous names first coined in “baby-language,”—that aboriginal speech was concerned simultaneously with the naming both of particular and of generic ideas—_i.e._ of individual percepts and of recepts. It will be remembered that in Chapter III., while treating of the Logic of Recepts, I dealt at some length with this subject. Here, therefore, it will be sufficient to quote the conclusion to which my analysis led. “A generic idea is generic because the particular ideas of which it is composed present such obvious points of resemblance that they spontaneously fuse together in consciousness; but a general idea is general for precisely the opposite reason—namely, because the points of resemblance which it has seized are obscured from immediate perception, and therefore could never have fused together in consciousness but for the aid of intentional abstraction, or of the power of a mind knowingly to deal with its own ideas as ideas. In other words, the kind of classification with which recepts are concerned is that which lies nearest to the kind of classification with which all processes of so called perceptual inference depend—such as mistaking a bowl for a sphere. But the kind of classification with which concepts are concerned is that which lies furthest from this purely automatic grouping of perceptions. Classification there doubtless is in both cases; but in the one order it is due to the closeness of resemblances in an act of perception, while in the other it is due to their remoteness.”[191]