It would be strange, then, if, seen in so many of man's efforts to interpret the inanimate things around him, this process of self-projection should not also be valid for the larger relations of his mental activity to the universe. It is but a step, in fact, from the application of anthropomorphic words to the objects and processes of Nature, to the employment regarding such processes of anthropomorphic thought. As the child finds the satisfaction of its fancy in the discovery of some strange face as suggested to him in the decorations of the wall paper which surrounds his sick-bed, or in tracing out from the contours of clothes hung up within range of his vision the preposterous outline or figure of some human likeness or caricature, so the savage, with a deeper purpose born of necessity, traces out from the larger patterns of the moving world about him the organic shapes, embodying will and personality, that are to serve him as explanations of the external power which touches his existence for good or for evil, and which, thus serving him, enable him to come into relations with that power. It is the deepest interests of human life which make this process necessary, and it is of the very nature of the process that the characters thus projected into the environment must always--throughout the history of human ascent, and at every particular stage of it--be closely and definitely correlated with the degree and kind of the self-knowledge which is its source. The earliest of the animal characters displaying this correlation, and used as a means of understanding the environment, could not well have been other than that of motion. That by the higher mammals, at any rate, moving things, even when inorganic, are generally regarded as alive, is a view rendered probable by a large body of evidence.[G] But when man finally appeared on the scene, a new element came in to complicate the merely animal attitude in which vitality was attributed to inanimate objects in motion. By contemplating the phenomena of his subjective life, and observing analogous phenomena in his fellow-beings--through the consideration of dreams, swoons, even death itself--our ancestor discovered in himself a character deeper than that of vitality; came to recognize that the living creature, animal and human, possesses an inner principle or essence underlying its activities; is not only "alive," but also "animated." At first the conception of vitality was one with the conception of bodily activity; at last man learned to differentiate the movements of the body from an inner essence to which he believed them to be due--learned, in a word, to distinguish between the corporeal existence and the soul. And having effected this first rude division of the characters of soul from the merely physical attributes of life, our ancestor soon projected the new view which he had reached of himself into the objects of his environment. The beneficent influences of Nature, so