names, or that self-consciousness may exist without concepts. The truth of the matter is that philology has proved, in a singularly complete manner, the origin and gradual development in time, first of pre-conceptual communication, and next of the self-consciousness which supplied the basis of conceptual predication. No wonder, therefore, as Professor Max Müller somewhat naively observes, “it may be said that the first step in the formation of names and concepts is very imperfect. So it is.” Truly “to name the act of carrying by a root formed from sounds which accompany the act of carrying a heavy load, is a far more primitive act than to fix an attribute by a name” conceptually applied. So primitive, indeed, is nomination of this kind, that I defy any one to show wherein it differs psychologically from what I have called the denotation of a young child, or even of a talking bird. And, having reduced the matter to this issue so far as the results of philology are concerned, I may fitly conclude by briefly indicating the principal point which appears to divide my opinions from those of the eminent philologist just alluded to—if not also from those of the majority of my psychological opponents. Briefly, the point is that on the other side an unwarrantable assumption is made—to wit, that conceptual thought is an antecedent condition, _sine quâ non_, to any and every act of bestowing a name; and, _a fortiori_, to any and every act of predication. This is the fundamental assumption, which, whether openly expressed or covertly implied, serves as the basis of the whole superstructure of my opponents’ argument. Now, I claim to have shown, by a complete inductive proof, that this assumption is not only unwarrantable in theory, but false in fact. There are names and names. Not every name that is bestowed betokens conceptual thought on the part of the namer. Alike from the case of the talking bird, of the young child, and of early man (so far as he has left any traces of his psychology in the structure of language), I have demonstrated that prior to the stage of denomination there are the stages of indication, denotation, and receptual connotation. These are the psychological stepping-stones across that “Rubicon of Mind,” which, owing to their neglect, has seemed to be impassable. The Concept (and, _a fortiori_, the Proposition) is not a structure of ideation which is presented to us without a developmental history. Although it has been uniformly assumed by all my opponents “that the simplest element of thought” can have had no such history, the assumption is, as I have said, directly contradicted by observable fact. Had the case been otherwise—had the concept really been without father and without mother, without beginning of days or end of life—then truly a case might have been shown for regarding it as an entity _sui generis_, destitute of kith or kin among all the other faculties of mind. But, as we have now so