The earliest of the animal characters displaying this correlation, and used as a means of understanding the environment, could not well have been other than that of motion. That by the higher mammals, at any rate, moving things, even when inorganic, are generally regarded as alive, is a view rendered probable by a large body of evidence.[1] But when man finally appeared on the scene, a new element came in to complicate the merely animal attitude in which vitality was attributed to inanimate objects in motion. By contemplating the phenomena of his subjective life, and observing analogous phenomena in his fellow-beings—through the consideration of dreams, swoons, even death itself—our ancestor discovered in himself a character deeper than that of vitality; came to recognize that the living creature, animal and human, possesses an inner principle or essence underlying its activities; is not only "alive," but also "animated." At first the conception of vitality was one with the conception of bodily activity; at last man learned to differentiate the movements of the body from an inner essence to which he believed them to be due—learned, in a word, to distinguish between the corporeal existence and the soul. And having effected this first rude division of the characters of soul from the merely physical attributes of life, our ancestor soon projected the new view which he had reached of himself into the objects of his environment. The beneficent influences of Nature, so necessary to his life, he now invested with the good purposes of the better nature within him; in the maleficent forces of the cosmos he read the malignant will of his own angry passions.
But it is not as mere phenomena that these powers, thus finally ensouled and regarded as personal, can be thought about. In the beginning the human mind carries on its mental processes largely with the aid of images—recovered images of something seen, heard, felt, or tasted—and is yet far off from the stage of scientific thought in which abstract concepts take the place of the recovered mental pictures which have been yielded through the senses. Man thus needed concrete images with which to think about the personal powers of the external world, and he naturally found them in the animal and human shapes already familiar to him. Discovering some likeness between a Nature force and some animal, he henceforth associated the two, and recalled the image of the animal as the more concrete means of mental recovery when he wished to think of the abstract Nature power. Or, associating some departed ancestor, relative, hero, or king with the Nature force—an association which would be greatly strengthened by belief in the survival of the soul after death—-
- ↑ See a paper by G. K. Schneider in vol. ii of Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie.
