Chapter IX (part 5)

We perceive convexity or sphericality as a common property of many surfaces. The animal, on the contrary, because of the very properties of its psychic apparatus, will perceive that sphericality as an individual property of a given sphere. Now how will this sphericality as an individual property of a given sphere appear to it? We may declare with complete assurance that the sphericality will appear to the animal as a movement on the surface which it sees. During the approach of the animal toward the sphere something like the following must happen: the surface which the animal sees starts to move quickly; its center spreads out, and all of the other points run away from the center with a velocity proportional to their distance from the center (or the square of their distance from the center). It is in this way that the animal senses the spherical surface— much as we sense sound . At a certain distance from the sphere the animal perceives it as a plane. Approaching or touching some point on the sphere it sees that all other points have changed with relation to this particular point, they have all altered their position on the plane—have moved to one side, as it were. Touching another point, it sees that all the rest have moved in similar fashion. This property of the sphere will appear as its motion , its "vibration." The sphere will actually resemble a vibrating, oscillating surface, in the same way that each angle of an immobile object will appear to the animal as a motion . The animal can see an angle of a three-dimensional object only while moving past it, and during the time it takes, the object will seem to the animal to have turned—a new side has appeared, and the side first seen has disappeared or moved away. The angle will be perceived as rotation, as the motion of the object, i.e., as something transient, temporal, as a change of state in the object. Remembering the angles which it has seen before—seen as the motion of bodies—the animal will consider that they have ceased, have ended, have disappeared—that they are in the past . p. 106 Of course the animal cannot reason in this way, but it acts as though it had thus reasoned. Could the animal think about those phenomena which have not yet entered into its life (i.e., angles and curved surfaces) it would undoubtedly imagine them in time only : it could not prefigure for them any real existence at the present moment when they have not yet appeared . And were it able to express an opinion on this subject, it would say that angles exist in potentiality , that they will be , but that for the present they do not exist . The angle of a house past which a horse runs every day is a phenomenon, repeating under certain circumstances , but nevertheless a phenomenon proceeding in time , and not a spatial and constant property of the house. For the animal the angle will be a temporal phenomenon and not a spatial one, as it is for us. Thus we see that the animal will perceive the properties of our third dimension as motions, and will refer these properties to time , i.e., to the past or future, or to the present—the moment of the transition of the future into the past. This circumstance is in the highest degree important, for there-in lies the key to our own receptivity of the world; we shall therefore examine into it more in detail. ______ Up to the present time we have taken into consideration only the higher animals: the dog, the cat, the horse. Let us now try the lower: let us take the snail. We know nothing about its inner life, but undoubtedly its receptivity resembles ours scarcely at all. In all probability the snail possesses some obscure sensations of its environment.