he understood that for the purpose in view, all these objects were identical. “This substitution, though impossible for the dog, any man but the stupidest could not fail to do.” I am not sure of this, despite the categorical assertion of the author; yet, discussion apart, it must be admitted that this would be asking the dog to exhibit a man’s reason.[21] As a matter of fact, notwithstanding contrary appearances, James arrives at a conclusion not very different from our own. “The characters extracted by animals are very few, and always related to their immediate interests and emotions.” This is what we termed above, empirical reasoning.[22] G. Leroy said: “Animals reason, but differently from ourselves.” This is a negative position. We advance a step farther in saying: their reasoning consists in a heritage of concrete or generic images, adapted to a determined end,—intermediary between the percepts and the act. It is impossible to reduce everything to association by similarity, much less by contiguity, alone; since such procedure results necessarily in the formation of unchangeable habits, in limitation to a narrow routine, whereas we have seen that certain animals are capable of breaking through such restrictions. ON CHILDREN. We are here concerned with children who have not yet learned to speak, and with such alone. In contradistinction to animals, and to deaf-mutes when left to themselves, infancy represents a transitory state of which no upper limit can be fixed, seeing that speech appears progressively. The child forms his baby-vocabulary little by little, and at first imposes it upon others, until such time as he is made to learn the language of his country. We may provisionally neglect this period of transition, studying only the dumb, or monosyllabic and gesture phase. The problem proposed at the end of the seventeenth century (perhaps before), which divided philosophers into two camps, was whether the human individual starts with general terms, or with particulars. At a later time, the question was proposed for the human race as a whole, in reference to the origin of language. Locke maintained the thesis of the particular: “The ideas that children form of the persons with whom they converse resemble the persons themselves, and can only be particular.” So, too, Condillac, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, and the majority of those who represent the so-called sensationalist school. The thesis of the general was upheld by authors of no less authority, commencing with Leibnitz: “Children, and those who are ill-acquainted with the language they desire to speak, or the matter whereof they discourse, make use of general terms, such as _thing_, _animal_, _plant_, in lieu of the proper terms which are wanting to them; and it is certain that all proper or individual names were originally appellative or general.”[23]