Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/326

 obstinately than the myths. And apart from its personifications of the inanimate, the economy of language treats all processes after the analogy of animal activities, all that is thought after the analogy of what is perceived, all that is perceived after the analogy of the organic beings to which the “I” of the speaker himself belongs. But where there appear to be activities of things—an appearance often due to our mode of speech—then the inference is given ab esse ad posse, from action to the power of action, and thus the “properties” of the “thing,” perceptible and concealed (occult qualities), become “forces,” from which the actual events necessarily, or, at any rate, in a comprehensible manner, proceed. We may take it as a familiar fact that these interpretations through the vehicle of so-called metaphysics, penetrate deep into the sciences, and can only be weeded out again with great difficulty. By the attribution of names, natural thought immediately satisfies the recurring need for knowledge and explanation; and this is closely connected with that imaginative-poetic animisation of nature which is always drawing fresh material from it, even though it becomes gradually drier and more prosaic. Even after scientific thought has proceeded so far as in our days among the best educated, that need is still always satisfied, when the activity of a human being is asserted or indicated as the cause of a phenomenon; at most we ask perhaps about his motives, and these again we refer to names which denote something familiar to all, e.g. anger, revenge, love, hate, etc. Natural thought explains everything by this analogy; and in the form in which it remains current with us also, outside the sphere of human activities, it is satisfied by a reduction to the analogy, after we have ceased to believe in the anthropomorphic interferences of supersensuous beings. We find an oak-tree shattered. “The lightning has done that,” “the lightning must have struck here with terrific force”—it is something of this kind which we say when we follow our natural way of thinking; the imaginative and superstitious man of earlier times or of simpler culture says and thinks, “Zeus or God is angry with the possessor of this plot of ground, so he has shattered this oak with lightning”. But we may speak in this or a similar way even when we do not believe it, and then it is a poetical or rhetorical figure; from such a point of view and fiction there may finally arise a merely metaphorical expression, e.g. lightning has raged here. All figures of speech, of which the metaphor is by far the most important and most characteristic, have this in common,