t can a dog tell his neighbor of the delightful worry he enjoyed the
day before yesterday in the garden where the man with the biscuit tin
lives? Probably not, bark he never so expressively.

From the many anecdotes of dogs calling others to their assistance or
bringing others to those who feed them or treat them kindly, we may
indeed infer the existence of a social tendency and of the suggestive
effects of behavior, but we cannot derive conclusive evidence of
anything like descriptive communication.

Such intentional communication as is to be found in animals, if indeed
we may properly so call it, seems to arise by an association of the
performance of some act in a conscious situation involving further
behavior for its complete development. Thus the cat which touches the
handle of the door when it wishes to leave the room has had experience
in which the performance of this act has coalesced with a specific
development of the conscious situation. The case is similar when your
dog drops a ball or stick at your feet, wishing you to throw it for him
to fetch. Still, it is clear that such an act would be the perceptual
precursor of the deliberate conduct of the rational being by whom the
sign is definitely realized as a sign, the intentional meaning of which
is distinctly present to thought. This involves a judgment concerning
the sign as an object of thought; and this is probably beyond the
capacity of the dog. For, as Romanes himself says, "It is because the
human mind is able, so to speak, to stand outside of itself and thus to
constitute its own ideas the subject-matter of its own thought that it
is capable of judgment, whether in the act of conception or in that of
predication. We have no evidence to show that any animal is capable of
objectifying its own ideas; and therefore we have no evidence that any
animal is capable of judgment."

2. The Concept as the Medium of Human Communication[143]

There is a petrified philosophy in language, and if we examine the most
ancient word for "name," we find it is _naman_ in Sanskrit, _nomen_ in
Latin, _namo_ in Gothic. This _naman_ stands for _gnaman_, and is
derived from the root _gna_, to know, and meant originally that by which
we know a thing.

And how do we know things?

The first step toward the real knowledge, a step which, however small in
appearance, separates man forever from all other animals, is _the naming
of a thing_, or the making a thing knowable. All nami