But here we shall perhaps be reminded that, as Mr. Spencer says, the distinction between things animate and inanimate is quite clear even to the brute, and, _a fortiori_, to primitive man; so that primitive man will not attribute desire or volition to a thing which he knows to be inanimate—_animate_, _inanimate_; how we do come back to the vague! Under each of these terms the modern man ranges a group of ideas absolutely inaccessible to primitive man and to the lower animals. Personally we deny that the distinction between animate and inanimate was present in the earliest stages of intellectual evolution. Certainly both the animal and the savage recognized a division of the phenomena of nature into two classes; one is composed of the things which are disposed to do them good or evil, the other is composed of those which ignore them simply; that is the primitive distinction. As to an acquaintance with animate and inanimate they are innocent of anything of the kind; on this point, as on all others, they confine themselves to the grossest sense-experience. Their senses inform them that certain objects are beings who are altogether inoffensive, who eat nobody and are not themselves good to eat; one gives them no further attention; practically they do not exist. I one day asked a peasant woman the name of a small plant. She looked at me with frank astonishment and replied, with a shake of the head, “_Ce n’est rien_—it is nothing; it is not good to eat!” That woman was on a level with primitive man. In the eyes of the latter, as in the eye of an animal, one-half the phenomena of nature are _nothing_—they do not count; one scarcely sees them. The fruits on a tree, on the contrary, are _good to eat_. The savage, however, perceives immediately that the fruit makes no active resistance, does not cry out when he bites into it; and he considers it, therefore, as on all accounts absolutely indifferent, except that it is good to eat. But given a fruit that poisons him, he promptly fears it and venerates it. Similarly with animals: stones and vegetation hold equally aloof from the carnivora, are practically as distant as the moon and the stars. The herbivora, on the contrary, pay no attention to anything but vegetation. Natural objects being thus parcelled off into two classes, the class of the indifferent and inoffensive, and the class of the useful and hurtful, the animal soon learns to recognize that in the second class the most important objects are those which possess spontaneity of movement. But in his eyes—and this is a fact of capital importance—spontaneity of movement is not the exclusive sign of _life_, of interior activity; it is a sign simply of utility, or of heightened danger for him. He is wholly preoccupied with personal and practical consequences; he indulges in no superfluity of inference in regard to the object itself; he does not speculate. Moreover, a moving object which in nowise affects his sensibility