24 ANIMAL LIFE 



The problems by which animals and ourselves are 

 confronted can be resolved into three : 



1. The maintenance of self. 



2. The development of self. 



3. The welfare of the race. 



To the maintenance of self a station in life is 

 necessary, power to acquire food and to repel enemies, 

 ability to build up the food into that frame which is 

 the outcome of past history bequeathed to its possessor 

 by its parents. In this activity an animal is guided 

 by a faculty for orderly response that shapes its 

 behaviour. Through these responses it gains a sense 

 of the world around, and the habits so formed are 

 as original, and yet as much the outcome of latent 

 inherited capacity, as the body which they direct. 



But an animal is not born fully formed or com- 

 pletely endued with all the psychic experience that it 

 needs. Not merely to maintain itself, but to develop, 

 is its task, to which every impulse awakened by the 

 outer world of light, water, and air, or the inner 

 stimulus of hunger, activity, and desire, impels it. 

 Impressions keener than any subsequent ones teach 

 a newborn creature the unexpectedness of events. If 

 a marine animal, it learns the difficulties of balance, 

 the rise and fall of the tide, the brightness of day and 

 darkness of night, the qualities of surface and of deep 

 water. If a land animal, it encounters the varying 

 heat and cold of air and earth, discovers the weight 

 of its body, and the difficulty of sustaining and 

 propelling it. If sufficient food is obtained, it grows 



