child there is still comparatively little contrast between living and
non-living organs. There is equally little contrast between sleeping
and waking condition in its soul. And the nature of the soul at this
stage is volition throughout. Never, in fact, does man's soul so
intensively will as in the time when it is occupied in bringing the
body into an upright position, and never again does it exert its
strength with the same unconsciousness of the goal to which it strives.

What, then, is the soul's characteristic relationship to the world
around at this stage? The following observations will enable us to
answer this question.

It is well known that small children often angrily strike an object
against which they have stumbled. This has been interpreted as
'animism', by which it is meant that the child, by analogy with his
experience of himself as a soul-filled body, imagines the things in his
surroundings to be similarly ensouled. Anyone who really observes the
child's mode of experience (of which we as adults, indeed, keep
something in our will-life) is led to a quite different interpretation
of such a phenomenon. For he realizes that the child neither
experiences himself as soul-entity distinct from his body, nor faces
the content of the world in so detached a manner as to be in need of
using his imagination to read into it any soul-entities distinct from
his own.

In this early period of his life the human being still feels the world
as part of himself, and himself as part of the world. Consequently, his
relation to the objects around him and to his own body is one and the
same. To the example of the child beating the external object he has
stumbled against, there belongs the complementary picture of the child