Many animals are capable of experiencing needs without regard to a useful purpose. For instance, they like to exercise their animal functions for the pleasure of doing so, that is to say, to play. Some among them experience æsthetic impressions. They are also, without the slightest doubt, capable of altruistic feelings. Sometimes these feelings show themselves in the shape of domestic affection, and tend to make a solitary life unbearable to the individual. Family life then becomes permanent. Sometimes an animal devotes itself to the service of a superior race. Do we know to what lengths the progress of altruism would go in certain animal species, if their intelligence could have been more developed, and if their surroundings had allowed of their more extensive social progress?[211] Finally, animals even possess a rudiment of religion, if by this we understand an endeavour to interpret the phenomena which strike them. When sufficiently developed to manifest, where there is sufficient leisure, a certain speculative activity, they reach spontaneously, in the same way as we do ourselves, a kind of low fetichism, which consists in supposing that external bodies are animated by will and by passions.[212] “A child, a savage, a dog, a monkey, seeing a watch for the first time, will see in it a kind of animal.” But Comte at once adds that the chief difference between man and animals lies in the impossibility for the latter to emerge from the lowest degree of fetichism, and to rise to a real religion. No animal society “combines sociability with intelligence sufficiently ever to constitute a religious association.”[213] Comte would probably have approved of M. de. Quatrefages’ definition in which he calls man a religious animal. The decisive step was taken on the day when man’s intellect passed from fetichism to astrolatry.[214] That “great creation of the gods” was the first trial in purely speculative activity made by his mind. The whole subsequent development of humanity arose from this.