Observe the way in which an herbivorous or graminivorous animal becomes excited and angry when the branch or the ear of corn obstinately adheres to the ground, or offers any other difficulty to his immediate desire of obtaining food; he acts like one who has to do with a resisting power.  Observe how, when they are quietly stripping the bough, picking out the grains, or eating the grass, they become suspicious, or fly away if there should be any unusual movement in the bough, the ears of corn, or the grass.  In one way or another their food is regarded as a subject endowed with sympathetic and deliberate consciousness.  And every one must have observed that animals at play act towards inanimate objects as if they were conscious and endowed with will.

Every object of animal perception is therefore felt, or implicitly assumed, to be a living, conscious, acting subject.  This is due to the external reflection and projection of the intrinsic and sentient faculty, and therefore—­since an animal has not the duplex faculty of deliberate and reflex attention—­he cannot attain to the conception of simple external reality, of cosmic things and phenomena.  Every object, every phenomenon is for him a deliberating power, a living subject, in which consciousness and will act as they do in himself.  There are undoubtedly in the vast series of beings which compose the order of nature, and which he is able to perceive, degrees, differences, and varieties of energy, power, and efficacy with respect to himself and to the normal exercise of his life.  But he transfuses into all, in proportion to the effects which result from them, his own nature, and modifies them in accordance with the intrinsic form of his consciousness, his emotions, and his instincts.

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.