level as it reaches in a child who is late in beginning to speak.[331] If any opponent should object to this suggestion on the score of its appearing to beg the question, he must remember that this question only arises—in accordance with his own argument—at the place where the faculty of sign-making ministers to that of introspective thought. The question as to how far the lower faculties of mind admit of being developed apart from (or, as I believe, antecedent to) the occurrence of introspective thought, is obviously quite a distinct question. And it is a question that can only be answered by observation. Now, I have already shown that in the case of intelligent animals—and still more in that of a growing child—the faculties of receptual ideation do admit of being wrought up to an astonishing degree of adaptive efficiency, without the possibility of their having been in any way indebted to the distinctively human faculty of conceptual thought. * * * * * On the whole, then, it seems to me probable, on grounds of psychology alone, that the developmental history of intelligence in our race so far resembled this history in the growing child that, prior to the advent of speech, receptual ideation had attained a much higher level of perfection than it now presents in any animal—so much so, indeed, that the adult creature presenting it might well have merited the name of _Homo alalus_. And, as we shall see in my next volume, this inference on psychological grounds is corroborated by certain inferences which may reasonably be drawn from some other classes of facts. But in now for the present taking leave of this question, I desire again to repeat, that it has nothing to do with my main argument. For it makes no essential difference to my case whether the faculty of speech was early or late in making its first appearance. Under either alternative, so soon as the denotative stage of articulation had been reached by our progenitors in the way already sketched on its psychological side, the next stage would have consisted in an extension of denotative signs into connotative signs. As we have now seen, by a large accumulation of evidence, this extension of denotative into connotative signs is rendered inevitable through the principle of sensuous association. In other words, I have adduced what can only be deemed a superabundance of facts to prove that, in the first-talking child and even in the parrot, originally denotative names of particular objects are spontaneously extended to other objects sensuously perceived to be like in kind. And no less superabundantly have I proved that this process of connotative extension is antecedent to the rise of conceptual thought, and, therefore, to that of true denomination. The limits to which such purely receptual connotation may extend, I have shown to be determined by the degree of development which has been reached by the faculties of purely receptual apprehension.