beings.

Attention abstracts from some things before it and concentrates on
others. Through attention grows the capacity to discriminate between
the special, particular object and its general type. Generalization
arises, but not what is usually called generalization--only a
more elementary form of it. Memory, as the highest form of
representation--distinguishing it from mere recollection, which
reproduces only what has been perceived--such memory deals with the
general forms of objects, their continuity in time. Such activity of
memory, therefore, does not reproduce mere images, but only the
concepts or general ideas of things, and therefore it belongs to the
stage of mind that uses language.

V.

Language marks the arrival at the stage of thought--at the
stage of the perception of universals--hence at the
possibility of education; language fixes the general types
which the productive memory forms; each one of these
types, indicated by a word, stands for a possible infinite
of sense-perceptions or recollections; the word _tree_
stands for all the trees that exist, and for all that have
existed or will exist. Animals do not create for
themselves a new world of general types, but deal only
with the first world of particular objects; hence they are
lost in the variety and multiplicity of continuous
succession and difference. Man's sense-perception is with
memory; hence always a recognition of the object as not
wholly new, but only as an example of what he is mostly
familiar with. Intellectual education has for its object
the cultivation of reflection; reflection is the Platonic
"Reminiscence," which retraces the unconscious processes
of thought

Language is the means of distinguishing between the brute and the
human--between the animal soul, which has continuity only in the species
(which pervades its being in the form of _instinct_), and the _human_,
soul, which is immortal, and possessed of a capacity to be educated.

There is no language until the mind can perceive general types of
existence; mere proper names nor mere exclamations or cries do not
constitute language. All words that belong to language are
significative--they "_express_" or "_mean_" something--hence they are
conventional symbols, and not mere individual designations. Language
arises only through common consent, and is not an invention of one
individual. It is a product of individuals acting together as a
co