The external world appears to animals to be a great and mighty movement
and congeries of living, conscious, deliberating beings, and the value
of the phenomenon or thing is great in proportion to its effect on the
animal itself. The objective and simple reality, 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 confused
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 conscious 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 constitution of the animal kingdom, and it resolves itself into
a universal personification of the phenomena themselves. In fact, the
animal's intrinsic psychical personality is infused and transformed
into each of them with more or less intensity and vigour; the phenomena
are perceived by each individual just as far as he assimilates them, and
he is constantly assimilating himself to them. His communication with
the external world is in proportion with its internal reflection on
himself, and he understands just as much as his own nature enables him