50 MYTH AND SCIENCE. 



external acts, from every fact, passion, and emotion ; 

 and this is clear and obvious. This fundamental and 

 persistent self-consciousness persistent in dreams, 

 and even in the calmest sleep, which is always accom- 

 panied by a vague sensation is the consciousness of 

 a living subject, active, impressionable, exercising his 

 will, capable of emotions and passions. It is not the 

 consciousness of an inert thing, passive, dead, or 

 extrinsic ; for animal life consists in sensation of 

 greater or less intensity, but always of sensation. 

 Consequently, such a consciousness signifies for the 

 animal a constant apprehension of an active facult} 7 

 exercised intrinsically in himself, and it makes his 

 life into a mobile drama, of which he is implicitly 

 conscious, of acts and emotions, of impulses, desires, 

 and suspicions. 



This inward form of emotional life and psychical 

 and organic action, into which the whole value of 

 personal existence is resolved, may be said to invest 

 and modify all the animal's active relations to the 

 external world, which it vivifies and modifies accord- 

 ing to its own image. The subsequent act of doubling 

 the faculties which takes place in man does not occur 

 in the animal ; a process which modifies through the 

 intellect the spontaneous and primitive act. Conse- 

 quently, the active and inward sense which is peculiar 

 to the animal is renewed in him by the external 

 things and phenomena of nature which stimulate and 

 excite him. 



