personified by animals, for if they meet with any material obstacle,
they do not ascribe the sudden impediment to the impenetrability of
matter, or to superior force, but rather to an intentional opposition to
their aim or progress. We often see that animals not only exert
mechanical force to break through or destroy the material barriers
intended to keep them in confinement, but they act in such a way as to
show rage and fury towards a hostile and malevolent subject.

To return to our example; if an animal vivifies and animates some
special plant specially presented to him, he does not go beyond this
vivifying act; when he goes on his way, and no longer perceives the
concrete phenomenon, the animation at the same time disappears and
ceases. Man, however, by means of the classifying faculty we have
noticed, after repeatedly perceiving various plants similar or analogous
to the first, is able by spontaneous reflection, and by the automatic
exercise of his intelligence, to refer them to a single type, and in
this way the specific idea of a tree is evolved in his mind and fixed in
his memory. The same thing gradually takes place with respect to
flowers, animals, springs, rivers, and the like. These ideal types are
not wholly wanting even among the most barbarous peoples, in the most
concrete and dissimilar languages, since without them any language would
be impossible.

The same intrinsic and innate necessity which, both in man and animals,
automatically effects the animation and personification of consciousness
and will in the case of external objects and phenomena, also impels man
to vivify and personify the specific types which he has gradually
formed, and they take an objective place in his memory as the objects of
nature do in the case of animals. In this way man does not, like
animals, merely vivify the special oak or chestnut tree presented to him