66 MYTH AND SCIENCE. 



The external world appears to animals to be a great 

 and mighty movement and congeries of living, con- 

 scious, deliberating beings, and the value of the phe- 

 nomenon or thing is great in proportion to its effect 

 on the animal itself. The objective and simple realit} 7 , 

 as it appears to man, has no existence for animals ; 

 from the nature of their intelligence they cannot 

 attain to any explicit conception of it, so that this 

 reality is resolved and modified into their own image. 

 The eternal and infinite flux, by which all things come 

 and go in obedience to laws which are permanent and 

 enduring, appears to animals to be a vast and con- 

 fused dramatic company in which the subjects, with 

 or without organic form, are always active, working 

 in and through themselves, with benign or malignant, 

 pleasing or hurtful influence. It is for this reason, 

 and this reason only, that their life of consciousness 

 and of relation is so deeply 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 con- 

 scious 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 con- 

 stitution of the animal kingdom, and it resolves itself 

 into a universal personification of the phenomena 

 themselves. In fact, the animal's intrinsic psychical 



