ANIMAL SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 65 



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 move- 

 ment 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. 



