In the parrot this degree of development is but low; in the dog and monkey considerably higher (though, unfortunately, these animals are not able to give any articulate expression to their receptual apprehensions); in the child of two years it is higher still. But, as before shown, no antagonist can afford to allege that in any of these cases there is a difference of kind between the mental faculties that are respectively involved; because his argument on psychological grounds can only stand upon the basis of conceptual cognition, which, in turn, can only stand upon the basis of self-consciousness; and this is demonstrably absent in the child until long after the time when denotative names are connotatively extended by the receptual intelligence of the child itself. Thus, there can be no reasonable question that it is psychologically possible for _Homo sapiens_ to have had an ancestry, which—whether already partly human or still simian—was able to carry denotation to a high level of connotation, without the need of cognition belonging to the order conceptual. Whether the signs were then made by tone and gesture alone, or likewise by articulate sounds, is also, psychologically considered, immaterial. In either case connotation would have followed denotation up to whatever point the higher receptual (“pre-conceptual”) intelligence of such an ancestry was able to take cognizance of simple analogies. And this psychological possibility becomes on other grounds a probability of the highest order, so soon as we know of any independent evidence touching the corporeal evolution of man from a simian ancestry. Now, we have already seen that pre-conceptual connotation amounts to what I have termed pre-conceptual judgment. The qualities or relations thus connotated are not indeed contemplated _as_ qualities or _as_ relations; but in the mere act of such a connotative classification the higher receptual intelligence is virtually judging a resemblance, and virtually predicating its judgment. Therefore I think it probable that the earliest forms of such virtual predication were those which would have been conveyed in single words. And, as we have seen in the foregoing chapters, there is abundant and wholly independent evidence to show, that this form of nascent predication continued to hold an important place until so late in the intellectual history of our race as to leave a permanent record of its occurrence in the structure of all languages now extant.