This industrial power over nature is
taken to include man's power over the life of the beasts and over
all the elemental forces. A line is in this way drawn between
mankind and brute creation.
In other times and among men imbued with a different body of
preconceptions this line is not drawn precisely as we draw it
to-day. In the savage or the barbarian scheme of life it is drawn
in a different place and in another way. In all communities under
the barbarian culture there is an alert and pervading sense of
antithesis between two comprehensive groups of phenomena, in one
of which barbarian man includes himself, and in the other, his
victual. There is a felt antithesis between economic and
non-economic phenomena, but it is not conceived in the modern
fashion; it lies not between man and brute creation, but between
animate and inert things.
It may be an excess of caution at this day to explain that the
barbarian notion which it is here intended to convey by the term
"animate" is not the same as would be conveyed by the word
"living". The term does not cover all living things, and it does
cover a great many others. Such a striking natural phenomenon as
a storm, a disease, a waterfall, are recognised as "animate";
while fruits and herbs, and even inconspicuous animals, such as
house-flies, maggots, lemmings, sheep, are not ordinarily
apprehended as "animate" except when taken collectively.
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