So much, then, for what Archdeacon Farrar has called “_the hopeless poverty of the power of abstraction_” in savages. Their various languages unite, in verbal testimony, to assure us that human thought does _not_ “proceed from the abstract to the concrete;” but, on the contrary, that in the race, as in the individual, receptual ideation is the precursor of conceptual—denotation the antecedent of denomination, as in still earlier stages it was itself preceded by gesticulation. Such being the case with regard to names, it is no wonder, as we previously found, that low savages are so extraordinarily deficient in their forms of predication. * * * * * The palæontology of human thought, then, as recorded in language, incontestibly proves that the origin and progress of ideation in the race was psychologically identical with what we now observe in the individual. All the stages of ideation which we have seen to be characteristic of psychogenesis in a child, are thus revealed to us as having been characteristic of psychogenesis in mankind. First there was the indicative stage. This is proved in two ways. On the one hand, all philologists will now agree with Geiger—“But, what says more than anything, language diminishes the further we look back, in such a way that we cannot forbear concluding it must once have had no existence at all.”[296] On the other hand, even if we tap the tree of language as high up in its stem as the pronominal roots of Sanskrit, what is the kind of ideational sap which flows therefrom? It is, as we have already seen, so strongly suggestive of gesture and grimace that even Professor Max Müller allows that in it we have “remnants of the earliest and almost pantomimic phase of language, in which language was hardly as yet what we mean by language, namely _logos_, a gathering, but only a pointing.”[297] Secondly, we have clear evidence of sentence-words, as well as of what I have called the denotative phase, or the naming of simple recepts—whether only of actions, or, as we may safely assume, likewise also of objects and qualities; and whether arbitrarily, or, as seems virtually certain, in chief part by onomatopœia. Both these subordinate points, however—which are rendered more doubtful on account of the struggle for existence among words having proved favourable to denotative terms expressive of actions, and unfavourable to the survival of onomatopœia—are of comparatively little moment to us; the important fact is the one which is most clearly testified to by the philological record, namely, that the lowest strata of this record yield fossils of the lowest order of development: the “121 concepts,” appear to be, for the most part, denotations of simple recepts.