To the third, Romanes attaches capital importance: judgment begins with it. It may, however, be asked if affirmation really exists at this stage. For my own part I am inclined to admit it as included in the generic image in its highest degree (for here too there are degrees), under the form _not of a proposition, but of an action_. The hunting dog assuredly possesses generic images of man and of different kinds of game, under the visual and more especially the olfactory form. When it starts off on the scent of its master, of a hare, or of a partridge, this is surely a judgment of a certain kind, an affirmation, the least doubtful of all, seeing that it is an act. The absence of verbal expression and of logical information in no way alters the fundamental nature of the mental state. We have already (Chap. I.) spoken of _practical_ judgments and ratiocinations; it is needless to reiterate. The transition from the third to the fourth stage is even more important. It is here that the true concept appears; this point attained, an almost unlimited progress is possible. Now the true cause of the true concept is reflexion. This formula appears to us the simplest, the briefest, the most clear, and the most exact. There is the possibility of concepts where there is the possibility in the mind of detaching a single character (or several), extracted from among many others, of setting it up as an independent entity, of raising it into a _known_ object, i. e., determined in its relations with ourselves, and with other things. Example: to form the general idea of a vertebrate. But this fundamental act—reflexion—is not without antecedents, it does not spring forth as a new apparition. It is the highest degree of attention, i. e., of a mental attitude that we encounter very low down in the animal scale. Discontinuity of evolution, in the passage from lower to higher, is thus far from being established. Doubtless this, like all other questions of genesis, leaves much to hypothesis, and can only be decided on probabilities: yet these do not appear to favor a rupture in continuity, and opposition of nature. In sum—to confine ourselves to what is least contestable: given the cerebral and psychological conditions for speech (not for articulate language alone), and application of words to qualities and attributes raised little by little into independent entities,—and the decisive step has been taken. Such is intellectual progress, and we may remark in passing that the process which creates the true concept, leads fatally by the same issue to faith in idols, in the entities realised.