d perturbation when some new
phenomenon has startled them; they act as if it were really a living and
insidious subject, and then they gradually become calm and quiet, and
regard it as some indifferent or beneficent power.

I must adduce some observations and experiments from the many I have
made on this subject. It may be objected that if animals in their
spontaneous perception personify the object in question, they would give
signs of this fact with respect to all the objects with which they come
in contact, and among which they live, and yet they remain indifferent
to many of them, which is a proof that they distinguish the animate from
the inanimate. In fact it cannot be disputed that a vast number of the
phenomena and objects of nature are regarded by animals with
indifference; they are perceived by them, but it does not appear that
they suppose these things to be endowed with life. It is, however,
necessary in the first place to distinguish two modes and stages in this
animation of things, one of which we may term static, and the other
dynamic. In the first instance, the sentient subject remains tranquil at
the very moment when he vivifies the phenomenon or the thing perceived;
while the act is accomplished with so much animating force, and with an
implicit and fugitive consciousness, it exerts no immediate and sudden
influence on the perceiving animal, and consequently he gives no
external signs of the personifying character of his perception. In the
second instance, which we have termed dynamic, that is, when the
phenomenon or object has a direct and sudden effect on the animal
himself, he expresses by his movements; gestures, cries, and other
signs, how instantaneously he considers and feels the object in question
to be alive, for he behaves in exactly the same way towards real
animals.

Animals are accustomed to show such indifference towards numerous
objects that it might be supposed that they have an accurate conception
of what is inanimate; but this arises from habit, from long experience,
and partly also from the hereditary disposition of the organism towards
this habit. But if the object should act in any unusual way, then the
animating process which, as we have just said, was rendered static by
its habitual exercise, again becomes dynamic, and the special and
permanent character of the act is at once revealed. We have experience
of this fact in ourselves, although we are now capable of immediately
dist