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.

It is true that the internal act of the higher faculty of reflection has
hardly taken place before man unconsciously enters on a new and vast
apprenticeship, which soon distinguishes him from and exalts him above
the animal kingdom; science has already put forth its first germ. But
the reasoning and simply animal faculties were so mingled, that for a
long while they were confounded together in their effects and results,
as well as in their natural methods. We must therefore begin by
considering the nature of this primitive human perception, in some
degree identical with that of animals, so that they may be estimated to
be of equal value, a