And it is greatly through this personality that the scope of an animal’s life, as of the life of the human being, is determined; we are all more or less at the mercy of what we, in our blindness, call “blind forces;” but in all of us there is something which out of the “manifold” of the world seeks and selects a consistent experience, some principle which determines the scope of life.
Out of the many chemicals of the soil each plant draws those which are appropriate to its own life, each plant transforms them into a living thing, a definite beauty of leaf and bud.
And the alchemy of the higher creature does not only transform the material particles of the world, now into the ashen silky hair and yellow eyes of Mentu, now into the curly grizzled coat of Taffy; but through the intelligence and sensibilities, through the desire for approbation and of admiration, through the protective love of the offspring, and the pure straining after the affection of the human being, dimly understood, these dawning consciousnesses gather from the world of sensation, of intelligence, of emotion, such material as they can assimilate and transform, defining it into a life and world of their own.
If we cannot from the point of more developed moral consciousness, and higher intelligence, even seek to understand the dawnings in the lower creatures of that which makes us what we are, then to us animals are mere playthings or mere slaves, and we can have no least perception of what is meant by that earnest, if unrealised, “expectation of the creature.”
II
“All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure.”
The difference between different races of animals appears to lie very greatly in the different scope of their lives.
The cat’s life, as distinguished from the dog’s, is essentially independent; and this, combined with finer sensibilities and a less facile intelligence, give a predominance in the cat of these elements of character which as developed in the human being we call the artistic temperament.