io8 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP 



The supposed psychical gulf between human 

 and - non-human beings has no more existence, 

 outside the flamboyant imagination of man, than 

 has the once-supposed physical gulf. It is pure 

 fiction. The supposition is a relic of the rapidly 

 dwindling vanity of anthropocentricism, and is 

 perpetuated from age to age by human selfishness 

 and conceit. It has no foundation either in 

 science or in common-sense. Man strives to 

 lessen his guilt by the laudation of himself and 

 the disparagement and degradation of his victims. 

 Like the ostrich, who, pursued by death, impro- 

 vises an imaginary escape by plunging its head 

 into the desert, so man, pursued by the vengeful 

 correctives of his own conscience, fabricates a 

 fictitious innocence by the calumniation of those 

 upon whom he battens. But such excuses cannot 

 much longer hold out against the rising conscious- 

 ness of kinship. Psychology, like all other sciences, 

 is rapidly ceasing to attend exclusively to human 

 phenomena. It is lifting up its eyes and looking 

 about ; it is preparing to become comparative. 

 It has come to realise that the mind of man is but 

 a single shoot of a something which ramifies the 

 entire animal world, and that in order to under- 

 stand its subject it is necessary for it to familiarise 

 itself with the whole field of phenomenon. The 

 soul of man did not commence to be in the savage. 

 It commenced to be in the worm, whose life man 

 grinds out with his heel, and in the bivalve that 

 flounders in his broth. The roots of conscious- 

 ness are in the sea. Side by side with physical 



