I. The Difference Between Man and Animal

By reason of this, man learns however to make his whole perception of the world fruitful. He learns to make fruitful just what in reality has always distinguished him from the animal. Strictly speaking man is thoroughly unobservant about his own faculties, and he will become so increasingly if he develops only intellectuality in the age of the consciousness soul. If we go back to earlier ages we frequently find among talented men that they still had a certain sense also for their surroundings. If we take the conceptions that these men of old formed about certain animals, for example, these are often full of good sense. The conceptions in modern books on Zoology from the standpoint of abstractions are often quite honest and worthy of recognition, but full of sense, my dear friends, they certainly are not. I should like to ask you, in the first place, whether among the conceptions given out today in schools there are really any capable of leading you into the actual life of the animals? Moreover do not men today notice the timid gaze with which whole herds, whole groups of animals look out into the world—the timid, intimidated gaze? O, we shall learn to see it again when through our faculty of abstraction we have been driven to the Guardian of the Threshold, and are able once more to have sympathy with the animal—not the sympathy often produced artificially but a sympathy corresponding to to an elementary inner experience. It can be said that a peculiar intimidation, as it were, a timid outlook upon the world, is widespread among all the higher animals, all the warm-blooded animals. I was walking once with a university man and at a certain place on our way we saw deer, stags, scampering away from anything and everything. This man said to me: “Something must be the reason for this; formerly men must have tormented animals, shooting them and so on, so that the animal souls have become accustomed to fear men.” But there are other things besides men that animals fear.