187. While the primitive animal can experience the pleasant and the unpleasant only in the form of "undefined feeling", the more advanced animal has slowly developed the so-called physical senses such as sight, hearing, smell and taste so that by this means it can distinguish or discriminate between the special kinds or forms of energy waves or vibrations contained in its total experience of feeling of the pleasant and of the unpleasant. But here one has to remember that all physical experiences are "feeling". When we say a living being "sees" something, we mean that it "feels" a particular kind of physical energy. This energy is called "light". When it "hears" something in the same way it will "feel" another kind of physical energy. This energy is called "sound". And it is the same with "smell" and "taste", each of which expresses a "feeling" - in other words a specific type of vibration.
      The animal appearing in the first stages of the animal kingdom does not yet possess these senses. But this does not prevent the primitive animal from being able to experience the more commonplace, coarser feelings of the pleasant and the unpleasant; however, these experiences are bound to appear as identical with those "undefined feelings" which we have already mentioned. Plants, as indicated earlier, are only able to experience such feelings as "vague sensing" and it is the ability to experience those same feelings as a true reality which distinguishes animals from plants. Here one can understand that the memory images brought about by this weak experience and the faculty of recognition sustaining them must be of a correspondingly weak and primitive nature. When we consider that the faculty of recognition - according to special analyses - in a primitive animal can be released only in the body of instinct, then the recognition can appear only in the form of a "premonition" and not in the form of "knowledge". Therefore recognition in the zone of animals will be mainly not foreknowledge but premonition. But, on account of increasingly hard and rigorous conditions of life, little by little this recognition or premonition develops to genius. In this way animals are practised in recognizing to a wide extent the beginning of faint effects of coming events even while the latter are still quite subtle and not yet accessible to the purely physical senses. Thereby those faint effects already become indications, guidelines and warning signals for the creatures in question even before those effects of the impending event have come to any pronounced physical expression. And it is the further branching out in the development of this faculty of recognition which we call "psychic ability". This ability is that which leads migrating birds from one part of the world to another, guides the carrier pigeon and the bee back home again, and to a great degree allows animals to have a presentiment about a coming storm or any of nature's catastrophes. This psychic function of the consciousness exists right through terrestrial mankind's primary zones and can be traced up to the stage of cultured people. It is the basis of the first manifestations of the religious principle, the basis for "divine suggestion" and the basis for the fact that people in some particular areas of development are able to have faith without knowledge. But within the commencing stages of cultured human beings there begins a new and much more spiritual function of consciousness which makes the other one degenerate. And, as is shown later in Livets Bog, we know the symptoms of this degeneration by the terms "fanaticism" and "superstition". Although the faculty of premonition was pure and unalloyed in the first humans and is still so in animals, making them almost unfailing in their prognostications and psychic instincts, it is very uncertain and faulty in civilized human beings, only a weak reflection or an "echo" of what it once was. This psychic function of the consciousness is upheld mainly by memory pictures of feeling or sensational experiences, but the new spiritual function of consciousness, on the other hand, is founded on "intelligence recollections", by which we mean memory pictures of experiences released in the individual's consciousness by the power, now commencing to function, of the embryonic body of intelligence and through which there comes into being a clear and unshakeable spiritual day-consciousness.