The emergence of denomination. Darwinism and philology in George John Romanes’ Enquiry on the Human Mind

The paper considers some extracts from George John Romanes’ Mental Evolution in Man (1888) in order to analyse the author’s contribution to the debate on the mental faculties of human beings and the origin of language. By adopting the Darwinian view of a continuity between species – where all differences are in kind and not in degree – Romanes identifies in receptual ideation and denotative sign-making a common psychological and semiotic ground shared by humans and other animals, starting from which human beings gradually attained conceptual ideation and denominative sign-making. By applying this scheme to the findings of contemporary philologists, Romanes achieves his main goal of providing philological proof for his hypotheses, thus defending the Darwinian theory on the origin of language against past and present attacks at the hands of German philologist Max Müller.