Of course it goes without saying that this “closeness of resemblances in an act of perception” may be due either to similarities of sense-perceptions themselves (as when the colour of a ruby is seen to resemble that of “pigeon’s blood”), or to frequency of their associations in experience (as when a sea-bird groups together in one recept the sundry sensations which go to constitute its perception of water, with its generic classification of water as a medium in which it is safe to dive). Now, if we remember these things, can we possibly wonder that the palæontology of speech should prove early roots to have been chiefly expressive of “generic” as distinguished from “general” ideas on the one hand, or “particular” ideas on the other? By failing to observe this real distinction between classification as receptual and conceptual—_i.e._ as given immediately in the act of perception itself, or as elaborated of set purpose through the agency of introspective thought, Professor Max Müller founds his whole argument on another and an unreal distinction: he everywhere regards the bestowing of a name as in itself a sufficient proof of conceptual thought, and therefore constitutes the faculty of denotation, equally with that of denomination, the distinctive criterion of a self-conscious mind. But, as we have now so repeatedly seen, such is certainly not the case. Actions and processes so habitual, or so immediately apparent to perception, as those with which the great majority of these “121 concepts” are concerned, do not betoken any order of ideation higher than the pre-conceptual, in virtue of which a young child is able to give expression to its higher receptual life prior to the advent of self-consciousness. Or, as Geiger tersely says:—“In enzelnen Fällen ist die Entstehung von Gattungsbegriffe aus Mangel an Unterscheidung gleichwohl kaum zu bezweifeln.”[192] Again, if we look to the still closer analogy furnished by savages, we meet with a still further corroboration of this view. For instance, Professor Sayce remarks that in “all savage and barbarous dialects, while individual objects of sense have a superabundance of names, general terms are correspondingly rare.” And he gives a number of remarkable illustrations.[193]