Lastly, it is desirable throughout all this hypothetical discussion to remember that we have the positive evidence of philology touching two points of considerable importance. The first point is that, as in the aboriginal sentence-words there was no differentiation of, or distinction between, subject and predicate; so, until very late in the evolution of predicative utterance, there was—and in very many languages still continues to be—an absence of the copula. Nay, even the substantive verb, which has been unwittingly confounded with the copula by some of my opponents, was also very late in making its appearance. The second point is that, although “pronominal elements”—or verbal equivalents of gesture-signs indicative of space-relations—were among the earliest of verbal differentiations, it was not until after æons of ages had elapsed that any pronouns arose as specially indicative of the first person.[334] Now, this point I consider one of prime importance. For it furnishes us with direct evidence of the fact that, long after mankind had begun to speak, and even long after they had gained considerable proficiency in the art of articulate language, the speakers still continued to refer to themselves in that same kind of objective phraseology as is employed by a child before the dawn of self-consciousness. This, of course, is what on antecedent or theoretical grounds we should infer _must have been_ the case; but it is surely a matter of great moment that our inference on this point should admit of such full and independent verification at the hands of philological research. As we have now so repeatedly seen, the distinction between ideas as receptual and conceptual turns upon the presence or absence of self-consciousness, in the full or introspective signification of that term. And, as we have likewise seen, the outward and visible sign of this inward and spiritual grace is given in the subjective use of pronominal words. But if these things admit of no question in the case of an individual human mind—if in the case of the growing child the rise of self-consciousness is demonstrably the condition to that of conceptual thought,—by what feat of logic can it be possible to insinuate that in the growing psychology of the race there may have been conceptual thought before there was any true self-consciousness? Obviously this cannot be insinuated without denying those identical principles of psychology on which my opponents themselves rely. Will it, then, be said that the criterion of self-consciousness which is valid for a child is not valid for the race—that although in the former the rise of self-consciousness is marked by the change from objective to subjective phraseology, in the latter a precisely similar change is not to be accredited with a similar meaning? If this were to be suggested, it would not merely be quite gratuitous as a suggestion, but directly opposed to the whole of an otherwise perfectly parallel analogy.