“If we examine the words, those oldest pre-historic testimonies, we shall find that all moral notions contain something morally indifferent.” That is to say, they all contain what I have termed a “receptual core,” expressive of some simple physical process, or condition, the name of which has been afterwards transferred, by “fundamental metaphor,” to the moral “concept.” Omitting the illustrations, the passage continues as follows:—“But why have not the morally good and bad their own names in language? Why do we know them from something else that previously had its appellation? Evidently because language dates from a period when a moral judgment, a knowledge of good and evil, had not yet dawned in the human mind.”[280] Now, at present I am not concerned with this conclusion, further than to remark that I do not see how it is to be obviated, if our previous agreement is to stand with regard to the precisely analogous case of the names of tools. That is to say, if any one allows that the philological evidence is sufficient to prove the priority of words to the tools which they designate, consistency must constrain him also to allow that the fundamental concepts of morality are of later origin than the names by which they have been baptized, and in virtue of which they must be regarded as having become concepts at all. These names—just like the names of tools—were all originally of nothing more than pre-conceptual significance, serving to denote such obvious physical states or activities as were immediately cognizable by the powers of sensuous perception and direct association. Then, as the moral sense began to dawn, and the utilitarian significance of conduct as ethical began to be appreciated, the principles of “fundamental metaphor” were applied to the naming of these newly found concepts—presumably at about the same time as these same principles were applied to the naming of newly found tools. Now, this is only one illustration out of a practically infinite number of others which it would be easy to quote—seeing, indeed, as Whitney observes, that “we can hardly write a line without giving illustrations of this kind of linguistic growth.” And whatever may be thought (at this premature stage of our inquiry) concerning the application of the general principle before us to the special case of conscience, it appears to me there can be no question at all that this general principle of “fundamental metaphor” reveals the fact of an intellectual growth from what I have called the pre-conceptual to the conceptual phase; and, moreover, that it proves such a growth to have been the universal characteristic of human faculty in those pre-historic times of which language preserves to us the only record.[281] * * * * *