The sense that nature is animate, and in particular that men and brutes have feelings and thoughts, stands in greater need of criticism than of defence. I assume it before my notions of substance or of nature are clearly formed, and before I can distinguish animate from inanimate being. I assume it, not because it is at all evident or probable in itself, but because I fetch the materials for all my inchoate conceptions from my own sensibility: and in discourse (which I am busy with from the beginning) I unwittingly interweave the notion of animation in gathering my experience of essences and of things. I attribute an existence to these essences which is proper only to the light of intuition travelling over them: and I attribute to these substances moral attributes and sensuous perspectives also borrowed from my running discourse. This subjective matrix and envelope of all my knowledge, though I may overlook it, underlies knowledge to the end; so that I shall never cease to conceive nature as animate and brutes and men as walking thoughts and passions until I have advanced very far in scepticism. Even then, except in deliberate theory, my apprehension of nature will be fabulous and dramatic; so that now that I have officially reinstated my faith in nature, faith in the animation of nature will tend to slip in unannounced; somewhat as when an exile is amnestied or a foreigner naturalised, his parasites (if any) are silently admitted too. Yet this is not, or need not be, the law; and as it is legality in opinion that here occupies me, I will inquire whether evidence of animation (even supposing that nature is animate in fact) could by any possibility be found at all; and having cleared up that point, I will inquire further under what control, and with what chances of truth, I may imaginatively attribute animation to nature in the absence of all evidence.

Why do I attribute animation to myself, that is, to my body? That my spirit discovers a world with my body in it, is not the question; the why of that would be a metaphysical enigma obviously insoluble, arising out of a trick of thought and inapt application of categories. The point is why, when I feel a pain, I suppose that it is my back or my stomach that aches, and not simply my spirit. I think we may distinguish two reasons. One is that the pain is an element in the perception of my back or stomach; it is instinct with the loudest and most urgent animal faith; and it imperatively summons my attention to those obscure regions, and makes me wonder what is happening there. The other reason is that the pain may be associated with another observed event in which my body appears as an integral element, as when my back aches because I am being thrashed. My nobler thoughts are also known to animate my body for this external reason. It is my tongue or gesture that announces them, even to myself. Bad observers, who suppose themselves to see or to discourse without intervention of their eyes or larynx, imagine that they are essentially disembodied spirits, to whom all things are directly perspicuous, and that only a hateful invention of philosophers, called introjection or bifurcation, has put their minds inside their bodies. Whether incarnation is or is not a hateful fatality to spirit, I will not discuss here; but that spirit is incarnate, that it lodges in the body and looks forth from it on the world, is a fact easily ascertained by closing the eyes, taking a glass of wine, or blushing at having made a fool of oneself.

Faith in memory (which is involved in dialectic and in perception) also reveals to me what animation means, and obliges me to assert its existence. In dialectic and in perception I assume that recurrent views are being taken by me of an object identical with itself if an essence, or continuous with itself if a substance. Such recurrent intuitions or mentions of the terms of discourse are posited in primary memory, as well as in reversion to the past after an interval of forgetfulness. This remembrance is remembrance of animation. It posits thought, cognitive, synthetic, immaterial; but it posits it as having occurred in particular conjunctions at particular times, in the vicissitudes of a particular body, my own, in a material world. These alleged past intuitions could not be kept apart in memory, nor assumed to have been spaced at longer or shorter intervals of time, nor to have been enacted in a particular order, unless they were attributed to the past career of myself, an animal in the natural world, and grafted upon recognisable material situations and actions to which those intuitions were relevant. Nature is the canvas on which, in memory, I paint the perspective of my personal experience. Even a fictitious memory, or a false experience like that of a dream, is recognisable as having had a natural occasion and date, and as painting a particular incredible perspective of the same world. Otherwise, I should not think I was remembering my past thoughts, but I should be merely contemplating certain fresh essences.

By animation, then, I understand material life quickened into intuitions, such as, if rehearsed and developed pertinently, make up a private experience. The question whether nature is animate does not regard its substance, but its moral individuation. In how many places is experience being gathered? What evidence have I that nature thinks and feels, or that the men and animals think and feel who people nature?

I must discard at once, as incompatible with the least criticism, the notion that nature or certain parts of nature are known to be animate because they behave in certain ways. The only behaviour that can give proof of thinking is thinking itself. If I have ever conceived intuition or discourse at all, and obtained assurance of its existence, it has been in my own person, by knowing what I mean and am meaning, what I feel and have felt; and this posited discourse of mine has assumed, in my estimation, the character of animation of my body, by virtue of two additional dogmas which I have accepted: first, the dogma that I am a substantial being far deeper than my discourse, a psyche or self; and second, the dogma that this substantial being is in dynamic interplay with a whole environing system of substances on the same plane with itself. In this way I have come by my initial instance of animation in nature, on the model of which I am able to conceive animation in its other parts.

Now it is obvious that in many parts of nature, and especially in the language and gestures of men of my own race, I find a setting for mental discourse exactly similar to the setting into which I have put my own intuitive experience; so that their words and actions vividly suggest to me my own thoughts. Just as formerly I incorporated or introjected my thoughts into my own body, so now I incorporate or introject them into the bodies moving before me. Imitation contributes to this dramatic understanding, because I am not confined, when I watch other people, to remembering what I may have felt when I was in some such situation, or spoke some such words. Their attitude and language may be novel to me, and, as we say, a revelation: that is, they may by contagion arouse unprecedented intuitions in me now, which I unhesitatingly attribute to them, perhaps with indignation, swearing that such thoughts never could enter my head, and that I am utterly incapable of such feelings. Yet this is psychologically false; because if I understand a thought, I have it; though it may be present as an essence only, without carrying assent. The irony of the case is that very likely I alone have it, and not at all the man to whom I attribute it. Even the closest similarity in language or action is a very abstract similarity, and the concrete and full current of our two lives, on which the quality of intuitions depends, may be quite different. All dramatic understanding of which I am capable is, by hypothesis, my discourse. The most contagious feelings, the clearest thoughts, of others are clear or contagious only because I can readily make them my own. I cannot conceive deeper thoughts than my lead can plumb, nor feelings for which I lack the organ.

Of course by an abuse of language the word animation might be used to designate certain kinds of behaviour; as the ancients said the world was rational because orderly, or the stars intelligent because they kept going round in circles. So men or women might be said to think because they speak or because they write books; but it does not follow. The inner patter of words which I sometimes hear in myself, and which mystics have called inspiration or (when explosive) speaking with tongues, is not thinking; it is an object of perception that may suggest to me a subsequent thought, although often I see, when I try to frame this thought, that those words make nonsense. It is very true, as I shall find later, that the fountain of my thoughts, that is, the self who thinks them, is my psyche, and that movements there guide my thoughts and render them, as the case may be, intelligent, confused, rapid, or halting; also supply my language, dictate my feelings, and determine when my thinking shall begin and where it shall end. But the light of thought is wanting there, which is the very thinking; and no fine inspection of behaviour nor interweaving of objects will ever transmute behaviour into intuition nor objects into the attention which, falling upon them, turns them from substances or essences into objects of actual thought. By animation I understand the incarnation in nature, when it behaves in these ways, of a pure and absolute spirit, an imperceptible cognitive energy, whose essence is intuition.

Animation being essentially imperceptible and not identical with any habit or act observable in nature, I see the justification of those philosophers who say that animals, in so far as science can study them, are machines; the discoverable part of them is material only, just as is the rest of nature. But this conclusion being implied only in my transcendental approach to nature and my knowledge of her, can in no way prejudge her real constitution, which may be as rich and superabundant as it likes, without asking my leave or reporting to me her domestic budget; nor is anything thereby prejudged in respect to the nature or laws of matter, or the simplicity of its mechanism. Nature seems, at first blush, to have many levels of habit, irreducible to one another. As it was only the other day that a hint reached us that gravity and the first law of motion might be forms of a single principle, so it may be long before we hear from the biologists that chemical reaction and animal instinct are forms of the same habit in matter. Even if they are irreducible to a common principle, they will be two habits of matter, and nothing more. There is a sense in which every different manifestation of a principle makes a different principle of it, as the language of the United States might be said not to be English; but the alienation of form from form is not a departure from the habit of flux, complication, dissolution, and temporary arrest which runs through all language. So nature might be said to have as many irreducible habits as she has forms; but she has an underlying ground of transformation as well, on which, I suspect, all those forms are grafted, no more wilfully diverse nor artificially identical than leaves upon a tree; and when wiseacres, every day of every year, bring their ponderous proofs that life is not mechanical, that the human will, by exception, is free, and that a single disembodied purpose, by magic, makes all things dance contrarily to their own nature, nature and I wink at each other.

The circumstance that animation, by its very essence, must be imperceptible, and not a link in any traceable process, renders disproof of animation anywhere as impossible as proof of it. Those sentimentalists are short-sighted who in their desire to show that mind is everywhere, introduce mental forces or interpolate mental links into their account of physical economy. If thought was discoverable only in the gaps between motions, no thoughts would be discoverable in nature at all. I do not presume to say that nature can make no leaps; I leave her to her own paces; but I do not conceive that, if she shows gaps (and what is a gap but a transition?) I must hasten to fill them up for her with alleged intuitions. She may be made up of gaps; they may be her steps; and if her limbs have strength in them for leaping, let her leap. Her strides are their own measure; it is only my ignorance or egotism that can regard any of her ways as abnormal. Thought in myself has not appeared when my system has broken down, but rather when it has established quick connections with things about it. Thought is not a substitute for physical force or physical life, but an expression of them when they are working at their best. If I may read animation into nature at all, it must be where her mechanisms are sustained, not where they are suspended.

There are two stages in the criticism of myth, or dramatic fancy, or the sort of idealism that sees purposes and intentions and providential meanings in everything. The first stage treats them angrily as superstitions; the second treats them smilingly as poetry. I think that most of the specific thoughts which men attribute to one another are proper only to the man who attributes them; and the fabulous psychology of poets and theologians is easy to deride; it has no specific justification, and the moral truth of it can be felt only by a poetic mind. Nevertheless, when I consider the inevitable egotism that presides over the understanding of mind in others, I fear that I am no less likely to sin through insensibility to the actual life of nature, because my tight little organs cannot vibrate to alien harmonies, than I am to sin through a childish anthropomorphism which makes not only the beasts but even the clouds and the gods discourse like myself. After all, in attributing human thoughts (with a difference) to non-human beings, I recognise their parity with myself; my instinct is courteous or even humble; and my incapacity to speak any moral language but my own is not only inevitable but healthy and manly. Sages and poets who have known no language but their own have a richer savour and a deeper wisdom than witlings full of miscellaneous accomplishments; and when once I have renounced the pedantic demand that poetry should be prose, I can allow that myth may do the life of nature less injustice than would the only alternative open to me, which is silence.

This may be said also about myth regarding myself, I mean the attempts of memory, self-justifying eloquence, or psycho-analysis to unfold the riches of my own mind. How much do I know about my own animation? How much is too fluid to be caught in the sieve of memory, and to be officially assimilated in verbal soliloquy? When any one asks me what I think of the weather or of the Prime Minister, does my answer report anything that I have previously thought? Probably not; my past impressions are lost, or obliterated by the very question put to me; and I make bold to invent, on the spur of the moment, a myth about my sentiments on the subject. The present play of language and fancy may fairly bring to a head old impressions or ruling impulses; or I may have occasion to amend my first expression, and obeying a fresh suggestion of my fancy I may say: No, no; I meant rather this. Whereupon I may proceed laboriously to create and modulate my opinion, groping perhaps to a final epigram, which I say expresses just what I think, although I never thought it before. Such is my discourse when I am really thinking; at other times it is but the echo of language which I remember to have formerly used, and therefore call my ideas. It is clear therefore that even in expressing my own mind when I conceive what I have felt, I have never really felt just that before. My report is an honest myth.

The case is even worse as regards the emotions. What do I mean when I talk of my desires, my intentions, or the motives of others? Unless these things have been actually expressed in words which I can recover, neither I nor my neighbours have ever had in mind anything like what I now impute. My desire, in fact, was only a certain alacrity in doing things which afterwards I see leading to a certain issue; my intention (if actual at all) was a certain foresight of what the issue might be; and the motives I assigned to others were but ulterior events imagined by me which, if they had actually occurred, I suppose would have pleased those people. The sensations or ideas which may really have accompanied their actions, or the words they may really have pronounced mentally, are not within my view; if they were they would probably go a very little way towards preparing or covering the actions in question. These actions would turn out to have had subjectively a totally different complexion from that which I assign to them on seeing them performed. The very abundance and incessant dream-like prolixity of mental discourse render it elusive; and the discourse I officially impute to myself or to others is a subsequent literary fiction, apt if it suggests the events which the discourse concerned, or excites the emotions which those events if witnessed would have produced on an observer of my disposition, but by no means a fiction patterned on any actual former experience in anybody. My sense of animation in nature, and all my notions of human experience, are dramatic poetry, and nothing else.

There is therefore no direct evidence of animation in nature anywhere, but only a strong propensity in me to imagine nature discoursing as I discourse, because my apprehension of nature is embedded in my miscellaneous, serried, and private thoughts, and I can hardly clear it of the mental elements—emotional, pictorial, or dramatic—which encrust it there. On reflection, however, and by an indirect approach, I can see good reason for believing that some sort of animation (not at all such animation as my fancy attributes to it at first) pervades the organic world; because my psyche is animate; she is the source and seat, as I have learned to believe, of all my discourse; yet she is not different, in any observable respect, from the psyches of other animals, nor is she composed of a different sort of substance from the common earth, light, and air out of which she has arisen, and by which she is fed; she is but one in the countless generations of living creatures. Accordingly the analogy of nature would suggest that the other living creatures in the world are animate too, and discourse privately no less assiduously and absurdly than I do. It would even suggest that all the substance of nature is ready to think, if circumstances allow by presenting something to think about, and creating the appropriate organ.

The character of this universal animation, or readiness to think, is inconceivable by me, in so far as its organs or objects differ from my own. The forms of it are doubtless as various as the forms of material being; a stone will think like me, in so far as it lives like me. There are actually some men, a few, who do live like me; these also think like me; and we can truly understand one another and impute to one another the very thoughts we severally have. In such rare cases, human discourse in one man may bring perfect knowledge (though no evidence) of human discourse in another. In doing the same things and uttering the same words we have instant assurance of unanimity, in this case not deceptive; especially when it is not the outer stimulus that is common to us, but the spontaneous reaction. For this reason gesture or poetry is a better index to feeling than are events or information coming to men from outside. What happens to people will never tell you how they feel; the alien observer misunderstands everything; only he understands a mind who can share its free and comic expression. For this reason too psychology is not a science unless it becomes the science of behaviour, when it ceases to be an account of mental discourse and traces only the material life of the psyche. In order to communicate thought it is necessary to impose it.

Moral communication becomes surer in proportion as the discourse to be reproduced involves more articulation, more distinct turns by which fidelity in the rendering may be controlled. The form of thought is more easily transferable than its sensuous elements. Under the same sky, with the same animal instincts, with the same experience of love, labour, and war, one race or one age may be totally cut off from another in spirit. The same language, on the contrary, the same myths, legends, or histories, may be carried almost unchanged across seas and ages, and may unite the happier moments of distant peoples. The range of such moral unity is also easy to discover; I may learn how far languages or religions are diffused; they create recognisable moral communities. Indeed, they tyrannise over society, so social are they; and they often render people who share the same spirit cruel to heretics of their own flesh and blood. The humanities may prove inhuman; and the less articulate, more robust instincts of mankind may take their revenge by stamping the humanities out. Yet the barbarians, who are not divided by rival traditions, fight all the more incessantly for food and space. Peoples cannot love one another unless they love the same ideas.