“Now comes a very important consideration, that not only is the order of subject and predicate to a great extent conventional, but that the very idea of the distinction between subject and predicate is purely linguistic, and has no foundation in the mind itself. In the first place, there is no necessity for a subject at all: in such a sentence as ‘It rains,’ there is no subject whatever, the _it_ and the terminal _s_ being merely formal signs of predication. ‘It rains: therefore I will take my umbrella,’ is a perfectly legitimate train of reasoning, but it would puzzle the cleverest logician to reduce it to any of his figures. Again, the mental proposition is not formed by thinking first of the subject, then of the copula, and then of the predicate; it is formed by thinking of the three simultaneously. When we formulate in our minds the proposition ‘All men are bipeds,’ we have two ideas, ‘all men’ and ‘an equal number of bipeds,’ or, more tersely, ‘as many men, as many bipeds,’ and we think of the two ideas simultaneously [_i.e._ in _apposition_] not one after the other, as we are forced to express them in speech. The simultaneity of conception is what is expressed by the copula in logic, and by the various forms of sentences in language. It by no means follows that logic is entirely destitute of value, but we shall not arrive at the real substratum of truth until we have eliminated that part of the science which is really nothing more than an imperfect analysis of language.”[252] Again, as a result of his prolonged study of some of the most primitive forms of language still extant among the Bushmen of South Africa, Dr. Bleek entertains no doubt whatever that aboriginally the same word, without alteration, implied a substantival or a verbal meaning, and could be used indifferently also as an adjective, adverb, &c.[253] That is to say, primitive words were sentence-words, and as such were used by early man in just the same way as young children use their hitherto undifferentiated signs, _Byby_ = _sleep_, _sleeping_, _to sleep_, _sleeper_, _asleep_, _sleepy_, &c.; and, by connotative extension, _bed_, _bolster_, _bed-clothes_, &c.