William James: Dogs in the Drawing Rooms of the Universe

Once, many years ago on a street in London, I observed a group of very young children, walking single file as they do, with their teachers watching over. It was beautiful. I can still see them turning that corner in Hampstead Heath, with the old buildings framing a journey that was, for them, very insular. I realized in a flash that while I would remember them forever, they had no awareness at all of my existence. And it seemed to me that growth and maturation is indivisible from the expansion of awareness and consciousness. Growing is to take more experience into one's orbit. And all of this reminded me of my favorite quote* from the great William James, from the last chapter of Pragmatism. I should add, though, that our pets also inhabit a world, of smells and sounds, that is beyond our consciousness. So it cuts both ways.

I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangents to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dog’s and cat’s ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own.

* I snared this block quote from Jeff Carreira's amazing, lucid and erudite, philosophy blog.