When a parrot calls a dog _Bow-wow_ (as a parrot, like a child, may easily be taught to do), the parrot may be said, in one sense of the word, to be _naming_ the dog; but it is not _predicating_ any characters as belonging to a dog, or performing any act of _judgment_ with regard to a dog. Although the bird may never (or but rarely) utter the name save when it sees a dog, this fact is attributable to the laws of association acting only in the receptual sphere: it furnishes no shadow of a reason for supposing that the bird _thinks_ about a dog _as_ a dog, or sets the concept Dog before its mind as a separate object of thought. Therefore, all my opponents must allow that in one sense of the word there may be names without concepts: whether as gestures or as words (vocal gestures), there may be signs of things without these signs presenting any vestige of predicative value. Names of this kind I have called _denotative_: they are marks affixed to objects, qualities, actions, &c., by receptual association alone.
Next, when a denotative name has been formed and applied as the mark of one thing, its use may be extended to denote also another thing, which is seen to belong to the same class or kind. When denotative names are thus extended, they become what I have called _connotative_. The degree to which such classificatory extension of a denotative name may take place depends, of course, on the degree in which the mind is able to take cognizance of resemblances or analogies. Now, these degrees are as various as are the degrees of intelligence itself. Long before the differential engine of Conception has come to the assistance of Mind, both animals and human beings (as previously shown) are able to go a long way in the distinguishing of resemblances, or analogies, by means of receptual ideation alone. When such receptual discrimination is expressed by the corresponding extension of denotative names, the degree of connotation which such names may thus acquire depends upon the degree of this receptual discrimination. Even my parrot was able to extend its denotative name for a particular dog to any other dog which it happened to see—thus precisely resembling my child, who extended its first denotative word _Star_ to a candle. Connotation, then, begins in the purely receptual sphere of ideation; and although in man it is afterwards carried up into the conceptual sphere, it is obviously most imperative for the purposes of this analysis to draw a distinction between connotation as receptual and as conceptual.