FUNDAMENTAL RELATIONS OF ANIMALS 73 



intelligence; while between the production of an indefinite number 

 of organized beings, as the result of a physical law, and the repro- 

 duction of these same organized beings by themselves, there is no 

 necessary connection. The successive generations of any animal or 

 plant cannot stand, as far as their origin is concerned, in any causal 

 relation to physical agents, if these agents have not the power of 

 delegating their own action to the full extent to which they have 

 already been productive in the first appearance of these beings; for 

 it is a physical law that the resultant is equal to the forces applied. 

 If any new being has ever been produced by such agencies, how 

 could the successive generations enter, at the time of their birth, into 

 the same relations to these agents as their ancestors, if these beings 

 had not in themselves the faculty of sustaining their character, in 

 spite of these agents? Why, again, should animals and plants at once 

 begin to decompose under the very influence of all those agents 

 which have been subservient to the maintenance of their life as soon 

 as life ceases, if life is limited or determined by them? 



There exist between individuals of the same species relations far 

 more complicated than those already alluded to, which go still fur- 

 ther to disprove any possibility of causal dependence of organized 

 beings upon physical agents. The relations upon which the main- 

 tenance of species is based throughout the animal kingdom, in the 

 universal antagonism of sex and the infinite diversity of these con- 

 nections in different types, have really nothing to do with external 

 conditions of existence; they indicate only relations of individuals 

 to individuals, beyond their connections with the material world 

 in which they live. How, then, could these relations be the result of 

 physical causes, when physical agents are known to have a specific 

 sphere of action in no way bearing upon this sphere of phenomena? 



For the most part, the relations of individuals to individuals are 

 unquestionably of an organic nature, and as such have to be viewed 

 in the same light as any other structural feature; but there is much 

 also in these connections that partakes of a psychological character, 

 taking this expression in the widest sense of the word. 



When animals fight with one another, when they associate for 

 a common purpose, when they warn one another in danger, when 

 they come to the rescue of one another, when they display pain or 

 joy, they manifest impulses of the same kind as are considered among 



