Now, as soon as these denotative names became at all fixed in meaning within the limits of the same community, those which respectively signified objects, qualities, actions, states, and relations, must necessarily have been often used in apposition; and, as often as they were thus used, would have constituted nascent or pre-conceptual propositions. The probability certainly is that immense intervals of time would have been consumed in the passage through these various grades of mental evolution; but when we remember the great importance of this kind of evolution to the species which had once begun to travel in that direction, we cannot wonder that survival of the fittest should have placed a high premium upon the instrument of its attainment—or, in other words, that the faculty of sign-making, when once happily started, should have been successively pushed onwards through ascending grades of efficiency, so that it should soon become as unique in the mammalian series as, for analogous reasons, are the flying powers of the Chiroptera. But however long or however short the time may have been that was required for our early progenitors to pass from one of these stages of sign-making to another, so soon as the denotative name of an object was brought into apposition with the denotative name of a quality or an action, so soon was there uttered the virtual statement of a virtual judgment, even though the mind which formed it was very far indeed from being able either to think about its judgment as a judgment, or to state a truth as true. Thus we perceive that two different principles were presumably concerned in the genesis of what I have called pre-conceptual predication. The first consists in the natural and inevitable extension of denotative into connotative terms, through the force of merely receptual association. The second consists in the no less natural and inevitable apposition of denotative terms themselves, whereby a receptually perceived relation is virtually—though not conceptually—predicated as subsisting between the objects, qualities, states, actions, or relations which are denoted. Of course it is evident that these two modes of development must have mutually assisted one another: the more that denotative signs underwent connotative extension, the greater must have been their predicative value when used in apposition; and the more frequently denotative signs were used in apposition, the greater must have become the extension of their connotative value.