From these primitive times onward, each century in the history of civilisation has brought a wider outlook. But the original tendency to animism has persisted and still persists. It has behind it an undying impulse. It manifests its vitality, not only among the uninstructed masses, but in the most select ranks of scientists and philosophers. And thus it is not too much to say that the idea of a universal life in nature is as firmly rooted today as it was in the dawn of man's intellectual development. The form in which the idea has been presented has changed with the ages. Mythology succeeded animism, and has in turn yielded to many curious and vanished theories, polytheistic, gnostic, pantheistic, and the rest. Now, the belief in distinct beings behind natural phenomena has virtually disappeared. Not so the belief in some form of universal life or consciousness--of which belief representative types will be given directly. Of the persistence of the mental attitude in the modern child, Ruskin gives a charming example, in his "Ethics of the Dust." "One morning after Alice had gone, Dotty was very sad and restless when she got up; and went about, looking into all the corners, as if she would find Alice in them, and at last she came to me, and said, 'Is Alie gone over the great sea?' And I said, 'Yes, she is gone over the great deep sea, but she will come back again some day.' Then Dotty looked round the room; and I had just poured some water out into the basin; and Dotty ran to it, and got up on a chair, and dashed her hand through the water, again and again; and cried, 'Oh, deep, deep sea! Send little Alice back to me.'" On this, Ruskin remarks--"The whole heart of Greek mythology is in that; the idea of a personal being in the elemental power; of its being moved by prayer; and of its presence everywhere, making the broken diffusion of the element sacred." It would seem that Dotty did not definitely personify the element, but was rather in the animistic stage. The identifying of the natural element or object with a definite personality is a further step taken, as Ruskin says, by the Greeks preeminently. But the beauty and the suggestive quality of the incident remain, whichever view be taken. A still more deeply suggestive example is found in Wordsworth's description of a boyish night adventure of his on Esthwaite Lake. For it shows the inner workings of a mind impressed by specially striking natural objects, and by the obscurely realised powers which they dimly manifest.