ning 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