At the outset, doubtless, the Ka was practically identical with the vital principle. Primitive man does not distinguish as we do between the animate and the inanimate. He projects his own personality into the things he sees about him, and ascribes to them the same motive forces as those which move himself. He knows of only one source of movement and activity, and that source is life. The stars which travel through the firmament, the arrow that flies through the air, are either alive or else are directed and animated by some living power. Movement, in fact, implies life, and the moving object, whatever it may be, is a living thing. The old belief or instinct is still strong in the child. He revenges himself upon the ball or stone that has struck him as though it too were a living being. In the Mosaic law it is laid down that “if an ox gore a man or a woman that they die, then the ox shall be surely stoned”; and similar penalties were enforced against animals which had injured man, not only in the Middle Ages, but even in the eighteenth century. Thus a pig was burned at Fontenay-aux-Roses, in 1266, for having devoured a child; and in 1389 a horse was brought to trial at Dijon for the murder of a man, and condemned to death. In Brazil, in 1713, an action was brought against the ants who had burrowed under the foundations of a monastery, and, after counsel had been heard on both sides, they were solemnly condemned to banishment by the judge; while, in 1685, the bell of the Protestant chapel at La Rochelle was first scourged for having abetted heresy, then catechised and made to recant, and finally baptized.(22) The early Egyptians were not more enlightened than the orthodox theologians of La Rochelle. For them, too, action must have implied life, and the distinction between object and subject had not yet been realised. Hence the belief that objects as well as persons had each its Ka, a belief which was strengthened by the fact that they all alike cast shadows before them, as well as the further belief that the nature of the Ka was in either case the same. Hence it was, moreover, that the _ushebti_-figures and other sepulchral furniture were broken in order that their Kas might be released from them, and so accompany the Ka of the dead man in his wanderings in the other world. As life and the power of movement deserted the corpse of the dead man as soon as his Ka was separated from it, so too the Ka of the _ushebti_ passed out of it when its form was mutilated by breakage. The life that was in it had departed, as it were, into another world.