Understanding and explaining.—The attempt at sympathetic understanding of animal behaviour.—Intra-central orientation and disorientation of animals.—Comparative physiology of the senses and nerves in animal psychology

In the biology of the last decade, a great part has been played by the fiction that the living body is a machine, and can be understood in its functions as we understand a machine. We have set up against this the fiction that the organism is something entirely different in nature from inorganic matter. The difference between living and non-living nature in the light of this view was discussed at length in the first lecture. We will now assume further that all other organisms are allied in nature to us human beings, and to a greater degree, the nearer they are to us in systematic classification. In this sense, therefore, the plants and lower animals are very far removed from us: but the further we rise in the zoological system, the more similar do the animals, in a general way, become to human beings in their nature.