Since, to the percipient, the extrinsic form, whatever it may be, remains the same as that which was first presented to him, the phenomenon is bounded by his faculty of perception, followed by the immediate and implicit assumption of a subject, and consequently of a possible and indefinite causality.  This internal and psychical process of the animal corresponds with the actual condition of things, as they appear and really are; a correspondence which is in itself a powerful confirmation of the truth.

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; he attains therefore to the same results, that is, he animates the object of perception, and considers it as an efficient cause.  This identical faculty of perception in man and animals was only differentiated when the reflex power of man subsequently enabled him to regard objects, as we do now, as inanimate, and subject to the universal laws of nature.

Even now, after all our scientific attainments, we are not wholly free from the former innate illusion; we often act towards things as if we lived in the early days of our race, and continue that primitive process of personification in the case of certain objects.