In these first and simplest inferences the conclusion may follow so continuously upon the 'sign' that the latter is not discriminated or attended to as a separate object by the mind. Even now we can seldom define the optical signs which lead us to infer the shapes and distances of the objects which by their aid we so unhesitatingly perceive. The objects, too, when thus inferred, are general objects. The dog crossing a scent thinks of a deer in general, or of another dog in general, not of a particular deer or dog. To these most primitive abstract objects Dr. G. J. Romanes gives the name of recepts or generic ideas, to distinguish them from concepts and general ideas properly so called.[321] They are not analyzed or defined, but only imagined.
"It requires but a slight analysis of our ordinary mental processes to prove that all our simpler ideas are group-arrangements which have been formed spontaneously or without any of that intentionally comparing, sifting, and combining process which is required in the higher departments of ideational activity. The comparing, sifting, and combining is here done, as it were, for the conscious agent, not by him. Recepts are received; it is only concepts that require to be conceived.... If I am crossing a street and hear behind me a sudden shout, I do not require to wait in order to predicate to myself that there is probably a hansom-cab just about to run me down: a cry of this kind, and in those circumstances, is so intimately associated in my mind with its purpose, that the idea which it arouses need not rise above the level of a recept; and the adaptive movements on my part which that idea immediately prompts are performed without any intelligent reflection. Yet, on the other hand, they are neither reflex actions nor instinctive actions; they are what may be termed receptual actions, or actions depending on recepts."[322]
"How far can this kind of unnamed or non-conceptional ideation extend?" Dr. Romanes asks; and answers by a variety of examples taken from the life of brutes, for which I must refer to his book. One or two of them, however, I will quote:
"Houzeau writes that while crossing a wide and arid plain in Texas, his two dogs suffered greatly from thirst, and that between thirty and forty times they rushed down the hollows to search for water. The hollows were not valleys, and there were no trees in them, or any other difference in the vegetation; and as they were absolutely dry, there could have been no smell of damp earth. The dogs behaved as if they knew that a dip in the ground offered them the best chance of finding water, and Houzeau has often witnessed the same behavior in other animals....
"Mr. Darwin writes: 'When I say to my terrier in an eager voice (and I have made the trial many times), "Hi! hi! where is it?" she at once takes it as a sign that something is to be hunted, and generally first looks quickly all round, and then rushes into the nearest thicket, to scout for any game, but finding nothing she looks up into any neighboring tree for a squirrel. Now do not these actions clearly show that she had in her mind a general idea, or concept, that some animal is to be discovered and hunted?'"[323]
They certainly show this. But the idea in question is of an object about which nothing farther may be articulately known. The thought of it prompts to activity, but to no theoretic consequence. Similarly in the following example:
"Water-fowl adopt a somewhat different mode of alighting upon land, or even upon ice, from that which they adopt when alighting upon water; and those kinds which dive from a height (such as terns and gannets) never do so upon land or upon ice. These facts prove that the animals have one recept answering to a solid surface, and another answering to a fluid. Similarly a man will not dive from a height over hard ground or over ice, nor will he jump into water in the same way as he jumps upon dry land. In other words, like the water-fowl he has two distinct recepts, one of which answers to solid ground, and the other to an unresisting fluid. But unlike the water-fowl he is able to bestow upon each of these recepts a name, and thus to raise them both to the level of concepts. So far as the practical purposes of locomotion are concerned, it is of course immaterial whether or not he thus raises his recepts into concepts; but ... for many other purposes it is of the highest importance that he is able to do this."[324]