Sentience

Archaic thinking proposes the existence of a soul or spirit within living things like birds and insects and trees, and even within inanimate things like stars and rocks. So Jainism and Shinto, both influential in the course of world thought. This is distinct from the magic of animism, with its anthrocentric point of view, its preoccupation with power and control.
Our philosophy of life and nature inevitably suggests this primitive or archaic notion of universally indwelling spirit or Spirit percolating from the past. This is true no matter what the technicalities of animation or sustainability or creation in our thinking. And this is good and right, and can be tested with simple logic. Because if we reserve the worthiest form of life only to ourselves as humans, what should even higher beings (whether you accept it as fact, possibility, or myth) think of our claim? Would they crush us in fear or repulsion? Destroy our habitat and well-being for their own selfish ends? Eat us? Presumably they would not because they are “higher.” Yet archaic religions have always expressed the fear that higher beings would and do exactly what we fear. They believed this because these higher beings were projections of the culture’s own malevolence. Even now, however, we humans inflict that suffering on “lower” forms of being. We still project these cultural accretions. Only the positive view of animating all of nature in some universal and benign way will move us to a higher philosophy of life.