The problem cannot be accepted under this form by contemporary psychology. It is equivocal. Its capital error is in applying to the embryonic state of intelligence and of language, formulæ that are appropriate to adult life only—to the growing mind, categories valid for the formed intellect alone. A reference to the physiology of the human embryo will render this more intelligible. Has this embryo, up to three months, a nose or mouth? Is it male or female? etc. Students of the development of intra-uterine life in its first phases are very cautious in propounding these and similar questions in such a manner; they do not admit of definite answers. That which is in the state of envelopment and of incessant becoming, can only be compared remotely with that which is fixed and developed. The sole permissible formula is this: Intelligence progresses from the indefinite to the definite. If “indefinite” is taken as synonymous with general, it may be said that the particular does not appear at the outset; but neither does the general in any exact sense: the vague would be more appropriate. In other words, no sooner has the intellect progressed beyond the moment of perception and of its immediate reproduction in memory, than the generic image makes its appearance, i. e., a state intermediate between the particular and the general, participating in the nature of the one and of the other—a confused simplification. Recent works on the psychology of infancy abound in examples of these abstractions and inferior generalisations, which appear very early.[24] A few examples will suffice. Preyer’s child (aged thirty-one weeks) interested itself exclusively in bottles, water-jugs, and other transparent vases with white contents; it had thus seized upon a characteristic mark of one thing that was important to it, to wit—milk. At a later period it designated these by the syllable _môm_. Taine records an analogous case of a child to whom _mm_ and _um_, and then _nim_ at first signified the pleasure of seeing its pap, and subsequently everything eatable. We are assisting at the genesis of the sign; the crude sound attached to a group of objects becomes at a later period the sign of those objects, and later still an instrument of substitution. Sigismund showed his son, aged less than one year, and incapable of pronouncing a single word, a stuffed grouse, saying “bird.” The child immediately looked across to the other side of the room where there was a stuffed owl. Another child having listened first with its right ear, then with its left, to the ticking of a watch, stretched out its arms gleefully towards the clock on the chimney-piece (auditory, not vocal, generic image).