Since an animal is devoid of the explicit and reflex process of the
intellect, it has not and cannot have any conception of the thing in
itself, the intrinsic essence of the phenomenon, nor yet of the
objective and cosmic cause; because it animates the phenomenon with its
own personality, which has assumed the external form of this phenomenon,
it is conscious of a cause, like itself, transfused into the object in
question. We have shown that phenomena affect animals in this way, and
that they are conscious of being in a world of living subjects,
constantly actuated by the deliberate purpose of influencing them.

The faculty and elements of apprehension are precisely similar in man
and animals, since extrinsic things present the same appearance to both
alike, and the perceptive power acts in the same way. We cannot, indeed,
go back to our first beginnings, and it is difficult for those who are
not accustomed to such researches to discover the primitive facts of
their own being, which have been so much modified by exercise and the
intrinsic use of reflection for many ages; yet some certain signs
remain, nor would it be now impossible to reproduce them. No one can
doubt that man also began to communicate with the world and with himself
by his perception of a phenomenon, of some extrinsic quality or form.
From this he directly apprehended the thing and its cause. No
intelligent person can believe that man had any direct intuition of the
thing in itself, independently of the extrinsic phenomenon by which it
was presented to his perceptions: he could not by the sudden
apprehension of all natural objects intuitively grasp the _Idea_. This
will be more fully shown in the following chapter.

In accordance with this statement, man, who still retains his animal
nature, has exercised the same faculty of apprehension by the synthetic
process of the three elements which compose it in the case of animals;