Having thus defined the simplest element of thought as a concept, I went on to show from the psychogenesis of children, that before there is any power of forming concepts—and therefore of bestowing names as denominative terms, or, _a fortiori_, of combining such terms in the form of conceptual propositions—there is the power of forming recepts, of naming these recepts by denotative terms, and even of placing such terms in apposition for the purpose of conveying information of a pre-conceptual kind. The pre-conceptual, rudimentary, or unthinking propositions thus formed occur in early childhood, prior to the advent of self-consciousness, _and prior, therefore, to the very condition which is required for any process of conceptual thought_. Moreover, it was shown that this pre-conceptual kind of predication is itself the product of a gradual development. Taking its origin from the ground of gesture-signs, when it first begins to sprout into articulate utterance there is absolutely no distinction to be observed between “parts of speech.” Every word is what we now know as a “sentence-word,” any special applications of which can only be defined by gesture. Next, these sentence-words, or others that are afterwards acquired, begin to be imperfectly differentiated into denotative names of objects, qualities, actions, and states; and the greater the definition which they thus acquire as parts of speech, the more do they severally undergo that process of connotative extension as to meaning which is everywhere the index of a growing appreciation of analogies. Lastly, object-words and attributive-words (_i.e._ denotative names of things and denotative names of qualities or actions), come to be used in apposition. But the rudimentary or unthinking form of predication which results from this is due to merely sensuous associations and the external “logic of events;” like the elements of which it is composed, it is not conceptual, but pre-conceptual. With the dawn of self-consciousness, however, predication begins to become truly conceptual; and thus enters upon its prolonged course of still gradual development in the region of introspective thought.