elements of human speech, or indices of the aboriginal condition of human ideation; but that, being the survivals of incalculably more primitive and immeasurably more remote phases of word-formation, they come before us as the already-matured products of conceptual thought—and, _a fortiori_, that on the basis of these roots alone _the science of language has absolutely no evidence at all to furnish_ as touching the matter which Professor Max Müller here alludes to in such positive terms. In this connection there can be no possible escape from the tersely expressed conclusion previously quoted from Geiger, and unanimously entertained as an axiom by philologists in general:—“These roots are not the primitive roots: we have perhaps in no one single instance the first aboriginal articulate sound—just as little, of course, the aboriginal signification.”[267] But the point which I now wish to bring forward is this. We have previously seen the source of these unfortunate utterances in Professor Max Müller’s philology appears to reside in certain prepossessions which he exhibits in the domain of psychology. For he adopts the assumption that there can be no order of words which do not, by the mere fact of their existence, imply concepts: he does not sufficiently recognize that there may be a power of bestowing names as signs, without the power of thinking these signs as names. Consequently, the distinction which, on grounds of comparative psychology, appears to me so obvious and so necessary—_i.e._ between names as merely denotative marks due to pre-conceptual association, and denominative judgments due to conceptual thought—has escaped his sufficient notice. Consequently, also, he has failed to distinguish between ideas as “general” and what I have called “generic;” or between an idea that is general because it is born of an intentional synthesis of the results of a previous analysis, and an idea that is _generalized_[268] because not yet differentiated by any intentional analysis, and therefore representing simply an absence of conceptual thought. My child on first beginning to speak had a generalized idea of similarity between all kinds of brightly shining objects, and therefore called them all by the one denotative name of “star.” The astronomer has a general idea answering to his denominative name of “star;” but this has been arrived at after a prolonged course of mental evolution, wherein conceptual analysis has been engaged in conceptual classification in many and various directions: it therefore represents the psychological antithesis of the generalized idea, which was due to the merely sensuous associations of pre-conceptual thought. Ideas, then, as general and as generic severally occupy the very antipodes of Mind.