those
most akin to myself, of my fellow-men, I feel--or, rather, I co-feel--a
state of consciousness similar to that which lies beneath my own
actions. On hearing my brother give a cry of pain, my own pain awakes
and cries in the depth of my consciousness. And in the same way I feel
the pain of animals, and the pain of a tree when one of its branches is
being cut off, and I feel it most when my imagination is alive, for the
imagination is the faculty of intuition, of inward vision.

Proceeding from ourselves, from our own human consciousness, the only
consciousness which we feel from within and in which feeling is
identical with being, we attribute some sort of consciousness, more or
less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for
they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply a struggle
to realize fullness of consciousness through suffering, a continual
aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and
yet to preserve their proper limits.

And this process of personalization or subjectivization of everything
external, phenomenal, or objective, is none other than the vital
process of philosophy in the contest of life against reason and of
reason against life. We have already indicated it in the preceding
chapter, and we must now confirm it by developing it further.

Giovanni Baptista Vico, with his profound esthetic penetration into the
soul of antiquity, saw that the spontaneous philosophy of man was to
make of himself the norm of the universe, guided by the _instinto
d'animazione_. Language, necessarily anthropomorphic, mythopeic,
engenders thought. "Poetic wisdom, which was the primitive wisdom of
paganism," says Vico in his _Scienza Nuova_, "must have begun with a
metaphysic, not reasoned and abstract, like that of modern educated men,
but felt and imagined, such as must have been that of primitive men.
This was their own poetry, which with them was inborn, an innate
faculty, for nature had furnished them with such feelings and such
imaginations, a faculty born of the ignorance of causes, and therefore
begetting a universal sense of wonder, for knowing nothing they
marvelled greatly at everything. This poetry had a divine origin, for,
while they invented the causes of things out of their own imagination,
at the same time they regarded these causes with feelings of wonder as
gods. In this way the first men of the pagan peoples, as children of the
growing