Lorenz is pointing at something that cuts deeper than a theory of animal cognition. The capacity to apprehend what is not presently given to the senses — to hold an image of the absent thing — is precisely what makes desire possible in the first place. You do not long for what is in front of you; you long for what the retained impression makes present in its absence. Phantasia is not imagination in the loose modern sense. It is the faculty that bridges perception and appetite: the absent thing appears, and appearing, it pulls.

This is where Aristotle parts from any purely stimulus-response account of desire. The animal that can retain a sensory impression can be moved by something not there. It lives, in a limited way, in relation to absence. What depth psychology will later call longing — the soul's orientation toward what it does not hold — has its first philosophical ground here, in a function Aristotle assigns even to non-rational creatures. The human difference is degree and articulation, not kind. Whatever is running in the soul when it reaches toward the missing thing is already running in the animal that retains its prey in image after the prey has gone from sight.