ipate to any extent what is going to
happen. He does not use one experience as a symbol and apply it
beforehand to other things and events. He is in a sense passive;
stimulations rain down upon him, and force him into certain attitudes
and ways of action. As far as his knowledge is "general" it is called
a Recept. A dog has a Recept of the whip; so far as whips are not too
different from one another, the dog will act in the same way toward
all of them. In man, on the other hand, the development of mind has
gone a decided step further. The child very quickly begins to use
symbols, words being the symbols of first importance to him. He does
not have, like the brute, to wait for successive experiences of like
objects to impress themselves upon him; but he goes out toward the
new, expecting it to be like the old, and so acting as to anticipate
it. He thus falls naturally into general ways of acting which it is
the function of experience to refine and distinguish. He seems to have
more of the higher sort of what was called above Apperception, as
opposed to the more concrete and accidental Associations of Ideas. He
gets Concepts, as opposed to the Recepts of the animals. With this
goes the development of speech, which some psychologists consider the
source of all the man's superiority over the animals. Words become
symbols of a highly abstract sort for certain classes of experiences;
and, moreover, through speech a means of social communication is
afforded by which the development of the individual is enormously
advanced.

It is probable, in fact, that this difference--that between the
Generalization which uses symbols, and mere Association--is the root
of all the differences that follow later on, and give man the
magnificent advantage over the animals which he has. From it is
developed the faculty of thinking, reasoning, etc., in which man
stands practically alone. On the brain side, it requires special
developments both through the preparation of certain brain centres
given over to the speech function, and also through the greater
organization of the gray matter of the cerebral cortex, to which we
revert again in a later chapter. Indeed, looked at from the side of
the development of the brain, we see that there is no break between
man and the animals in the laws of organization, but that the
difference is one of evolution.

Later on in the life of the child we find another contrast connected
with the difference of social