they then fall within the clinical entity “schizoid,” which means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word “thing.” A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne’s theorem that “No man is an island,” but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.

For example, if you hunt, especially if you derive your main subsistence from hunting, it is not a bad bet to surmise that the prey you are pursuing has an interiority of its own — whether you call it cunning, a soul or a theory of mind — and that you should look at yourself as if you were that prey so as to organize your moves accordingly (i.e. deceiving the animal by not doing what it would expect you to do from the position where it may become aware of your presence). Systematized in discursive form, in myth and ritual statements, this perfectly normal inference about the dispositions of an animal, and the equally normal process of empathy with a higher form of animal life, constitutes the experiential basis of what I have called animism, i.e. the assumption that, under certain circumstances, non-humans of various kinds behave as if they had an intentionality analogous to the one humans believe they are endowed with (Descola 2005a, chapter 6).