THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. yj 



The earliest of the animal characters displaying this correlation, 

 and used as a means of understanding the environment, could not 

 well have been other than that of motion. That bj the higher mam- 

 mals, at any rate, moving things, even when inorganic, are generally 

 regarded as alive, is a view rendered probable by a large body of evi- 

 dence.* But when man finally appeared on the scene, a new element 

 came in to complicate the merely animal attitude in which vitality 

 was attributed to inanimate objects in motion. By contemplating 

 the phenomena of his subjective life, and observing analogous phe- 

 nomena in his fellow-beings — through the consideration of dreams, 

 swoons, even death itself — our ancestor discovered in himself a char- 

 acter deeper than that of vitality; came to recognize that the living 

 creature, animal and human, possesses an inner principle or essence 

 imderlying its activities; is not only "alive," but also "animated." 

 At first the conception of vitality was one with the conception 

 of bodily activity; at last man learned to differentiate the move- 

 ments of the body from an inner essence to which he believed 

 them to be due — learned, in a word, to distinguish between the cor- 

 poreal existence and the soul. And having effected this first rude 

 division of the characters of soul from the merely physical attributes 

 of life, our ancestor soon projected the new view which he had 

 reached of himself into the objects of his environment. The benefi- 

 cent influences of Nature, so necessary to his life, he now invested 

 with the good purposes of the better nature within him; in the 

 maleficent forces of the cosmos he read the malignant will of his own 

 angry passions. 



But it is not as mere phenomena that these powers, thus finally 

 ensouled and regarded as personal, can be thought about. In the 

 beginning the human mind carries on its mental processes largely 

 with the aid of images — recovered images of something seen, heard, 

 felt, or tasted — and is yet far off from the stage of scientific thought 

 in which abstract concepts take the place of the recovered mental 

 pictures which have been yielded through the senses. Man thus 

 needed concrete images with which to think about the personal powers 

 of the external world, and he naturally found them in the animal and 

 human shapes already familiar to him. Discovering some likeness 

 between a Nature force and some animal, he henceforth associated 

 the two, and recalled the image of the animal as the more concrete 

 means of mental recovery when he wished to think of the abstract 

 Kature power. Or, associating some departed ancestor, relative, hero, 

 or king with the Nature force — an association which would be great- 

 ly strengthened by belief in the survival of the soul after death — 



* See a paper bj G. K. Schneider in vol. ii of Vierteljahrsschrift fUr wissenschaftliche 

 Philosophie. 



