When a man has taught himself—­and it is a difficult art—­to revert in this way to rudimentary consciousness and to watch himself live, he will be able, if he likes, to add a plausible chapter to speculative psychology.  He has unearthed in himself the animal sensibility which has thickened, budded, and crystallised into his present somewhat intellectual image of the world.  He has touched again the vegetative stupor, the multiple disconnected landscapes, the “blooming buzzing confusion” which his reason has partly set in order.  May he not have in all this a key to the consciousness of other creatures?  Animal psychology, and sympathy with the general life of nature, are vitiated both for naturalists and for poets by the human terms they must use, terms which presuppose distinctions which non-human beings probably have not made.  These distinctions correct the illusions of immediate appearance in ways which only a long and special experience has imposed upon us, and they should not be imported into other souls.  We are old men trying to sing the loves of children; we are wingless bipeds trying to understand the gods.  But the data of the immediate are hardly human; it is probable that at that level all sentience is much alike.  From that common ground our imagination can perhaps start safely, and follow such hints as observation furnishes, until we learn to live and feel as other living things do, or as nature may live and feel as a whole.  Instinct, for instance, need not be, as our human prejudice suggests, a rudimentary intelligence; it may be a parallel sort of sensibility, an imageless awareness of the presence and character of other things, with a superhuman ability to change oneself so as to meet them.  Do we not feel something of this sort ourselves in love, in art, in religion?  M. Bergson is a most delicate and charming poet on this theme, and a plausible psychologist; his method of accumulating and varying his metaphors, and leaving our intuition to itself under that artful stimulus, is the only judicious and persuasive method he could have employed, and his knack at it is wonderful.  We recover, as we read, the innocence of the mind.  It seems no longer impossible that we might, like the wise men in the story-books, learn the language of birds; we share for the moment the siestas of plants; and we catch the quick consciousness of the waves of light, vibrating at inconceivable rates, each throb forgotten as the next follows upon it; and we may be tempted to play on Shakespeare and say: 

    “Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
     So do their spirits hasten to their end.”