In connection with the subject of the present treatise it appears to me difficult to overrate the significance of these facts. The more that my opponents maintain the fundamental nature of the connection between speech and thought, the greater becomes the importance of the consideration that the higher animals are able in so surprising a degree to participate with ourselves in the understanding of words. From the analogy of the growing child we well know that the understanding of words precedes the utterance of them, and therefore that the condition to the attainment of conceptual ideation is given in this higher product of receptual ideation. Surely, then, the fact that not a few among the lower animals (especially elephants, dogs, and monkeys) demonstrably share with the human infant this higher excellence of receptual capacity, is a fact of the largest significance. For it proves at least that these animals share with an infant those qualities of mind, which in the latter are immediately destined to serve as the vehicle for elevating ideation from the receptual to the conceptual sphere: the faculty of understanding words in so considerable a degree brings us to the very borders of the faculty of using words with an intelligent appreciation of their meaning. Familiarity with the facts now before us is apt to blunt this their extraordinary significance; and therefore I invite my opponents to reflect how differently my case would have stood, supposing that none of the lower animals had happened to have been sufficiently intelligent thus to understand the meanings of words. How much greater would then have been the argumentative advantage of any one who undertook to prove the distinctively human prerogative of the Logos. No mere brute, it might have been urged, has ever displayed so much as the first step in approaching to this faculty: from its commencement to its termination the faculty belongs exclusively to mankind. But, as matters actually stand, this cannot be urged: the lower animals share with us the order of ideation which is concerned in the understanding of words—and words, moreover, so definite and particular in meaning as is involved in explaining the particular mesh in a large piece of wire-netting through which it is required that a straw shall be protruded. While watching this most remarkable performance on the part of the chimpanzee, I felt more than ever disposed to agree with the great philologist Geiger, where he says “there is scarcely a more wonderful relationship upon the earth than this accession [_i.e._ the understanding of words] by the intelligence of animals to that of man.”[82]