Among animals the necessity of finding food is the great and unfailing stimulus towards the exercise of their vital functions; food which may, as we all know, be vegetable, animal, or a combination of both kinds. It is evident that in the case of carnivorous animals the object which satisfies this desire is a living subject, of which it is necessary to become possessed by arts, wiles, sometimes by a fierce and cruel conflict. In these cases, animals are in constant communication with an animal world resembling their own, and the objective reality is for the most part resolved into living subjects, endowed with consciousness and will. But neither is the vegetable food of herbivorous, frugivorous, and graminivorous animals regarded by them, as it is by us, as a material and unconscious satisfaction of their wants; these grasses, grains, and leaves appear to animals to be living powers which it is necessary to conquer, animated subjects endowed with life, but for the most part inoffensive, and which, unlike the living prey of carnivora, offer no resistance.
Observe the way in which an herbivorous or graminivorous animal becomes excited and angry when the branch or the ear of corn obstinately adheres to the ground, or offers any other difficulty to his immediate desire of obtaining food; he acts like one who has to do with a resisting power. Observe how, when they are quietly stripping the bough, picking out the grains, or eating the grass, they become suspicious, or fly away if there should be any unusual movement in the bough, the ears of corn, or the grass. In one way or another their food is regarded as a subject endowed with sympathetic and deliberate consciousness. And every one must have observed that animals at play act towards inanimate objects as if they were conscious and endowed with will.
Every object of animal perception is therefore felt, or implicitly assumed, to be a living, conscious, acting subject. This is due to the external reflection and projection of the intrinsic and sentient faculty, and therefore—since an animal has not the duplex faculty of deliberate and reflex attention—he cannot attain to the conception of simple external reality, of cosmic things and phenomena. Every object, every phenomenon is for him a deliberating power, a living subject, in which consciousness and will act as they do in himself. There are undoubtedly in the vast series of beings which compose the order of nature, and which he is able to perceive, degrees, differences, and varieties of energy, power, and efficacy with respect to himself and to the normal exercise of his life. But he transfuses into all, in proportion to the effects which result from them, his own nature, and modifies them in accordance with the intrinsic form of his consciousness, his emotions, and his instincts.
The external world appears to animals to be a great and mighty movement and congeries of living, conscious, deliberating beings, and the value of the phenomenon or thing is great in proportion to its effect on the animal itself. The objective and simple reality, as it appears to man, has no existence for animals; from the nature of their intelligence they cannot attain to any explicit conception of it, so that this reality is resolved and modified into their own image. The eternal and infinite flux, by which all things come and go in obedience to laws which are permanent and enduring, appears to animals to be a vast and confused dramatic company in which the subjects, with or without organic form, are always active, working in and through themselves, with benign or malignant, pleasing or hurtful influence. It is for this reason, and this reason only, that their life of consciousness and of relation is so deeply seated and so readily excited. Nor do animals ever believe themselves to be alone among inanimate things; even when not surrounded by allied or different species, they have the sense of living amid the manifold forms of conscious and deliberating life which the world contains.
This constant and deliberate animation of all the objects and phenomena of nature is spontaneous and necessary owing to the psychical and organic constitution of the animal kingdom, and it resolves itself into a universal personification of the phenomena themselves. In fact, the animal's intrinsic psychical personality is infused and transformed into each of them with more or less intensity and vigour; the phenomena are perceived by each individual just as far as he assimilates them, and he is constantly assimilating himself to them. His communication with the external world is in proportion with its internal reflection on himself, and he understands just as much as his own nature enables him to grasp.
A careful consideration therefore shows that the conditions of animal knowledge consist in endowing the phenomena and objects of nature with consciousness and will. I think that this truth will prove a certain guide and beacon in the interpretation of the origin of myth and science in man.
CHAPTER III.
HUMAN SENSATION AND PERCEPTION.
In man, as it has been clearly proved, sensations and perceptions occur both physiologically and psychically just as they do in animals. If science and the rational process of the interpretation of things have their origin and are evolved in us by the duplication of our faculties, such a function, which is due to this duplication, is very slowly developed and exercised, and in its origin, as an effort of the intelligence, it does not differ from that of animals.