Opening remarks
After the prolonged early experiments with simple living forms, Nature started creating or rather evolving more and more complex forms. These animal forms had not only matter and life but also an early rudimentary mind that was at the service of the impulse to live.
Thinking sense
Then came a fierier breath of waking Life,
And there arose from the dim gulf of things
The strange creations of a thinking sense,
Existences half-real and half-dream.
Thought began to course through the primitive sense. It was not yet a conscious thought formed through self-reflection. It was rather instinctive, at the mercy of immediate sense-experience, driven by the senses.
Blind will
A life was there that hoped not to survive:
Beings were born who perished without trace,
Events that were a formless drama’s limbs
And actions driven by a blind creature will.
This life was driven mainly by a blind mechanical will inbuilt within it as instinct.
These lower and primitive animal forms had neither hope nor any other emotions that characterise higher animal forms. They came into being for a while and then simply perished without leaving a trace.
Moods of life
A seeking Power found out its road to form,
Patterns were built of love and joy and pain
And symbol figures for the moods of Life.
Here one could see the early stirrings of what will eventually develop into various types of emotions that constitute the drama of life. Here it began its first expressions through symbolic movements even though there was hardly any conscious experience of it.
Animal hedonism
An insect hedonism fluttered and crawled
And basked in a sunlit Nature’s surface thrills,
And dragon raptures, python agonies
Crawled in the marsh and mire and licked the sun.
This early animal life was a life of instinctive pleasure and pain. It wallowed in the mud and received its warmth from the soil and the swamp.
Dwarfish brain
Huge armoured strengths shook a frail quaking ground,
Great puissant creatures with a dwarfish brain,
And pigmy tribes imposed their small life-drift.
Huge and dangerous creatures shook the earth with their trampling weight. Yet their brain was small. This meant a massive vital strength at the disposal of sheer force of instinct rather than thought and feelings which tend to tame and temper it a little. Not only the animal kind but this layer extended in early humanity that was closer to the animal life with little aims primarily centred around survival needs with a small modicum of thought and feelings.
An early primitive humanity
In a dwarf model of humanity
Nature now launched the extreme experience
And master-point of her design’s caprice,
Luminous result of her half-conscious climb
On rungs twixt her sublimities and grotesques
To massive from infinitesimal shapes,
To a subtle balancing of body and soul,
To an order of intelligent littleness.
This early tribal life was built very much on the animal pattern of life. Yet this early humanity was to become the prototype of the later human race with its soul-moments and high aspirations. This half-conscious dwarf humanity, – dwarf possibly physically as well as psychologically, was made a link species that would eventually evolve into the full human type with thoughts and feelings and the spiritual impulsion defining it rather than mere bodily needs. Quite a few such intermediary sub-species will come between the earliest humanoids and the modern humans through the progressive growth of intelligence and the emergence of a new human order replacing the animal world.
Kingdom of the animal self
Around him in the moment-beats of Time
The kingdom of the animal self arose,
Where deed is all and mind is still half-born
And the heart obeys a dumb unseen control.
Thus arose the early animal life where there is no self-reflection nor any richness of emotions. It was an unconscious kind of living, mechanically so to say, driven by instinct and a blind will-to-live. It lived from moment to moment and thought not of larger far-off ends.
Closing Remarks
Thus earth saw the emergence of early animal life with a small and dwarf mind driven by sensory stimulus. The higher mental faculties, the deeper human emotions were still asleep.
