In common speech, even to this day, all men, both learned and unlearned, speak of inanimate things as if they had consciousness and intelligence.  While this mode of expression bears witness to the extremely early origin of the general personification of natural objects, it also shows that even now our intelligence is not emancipated from such a habit, and our speech unconsciously retains the old custom.  Thus we call weather good and bad, the wind mad (pazzo) or furious, the sea treacherous, the waters insidious; a stone is obstinate, if we cannot easily move it, and we inveigh against all kinds of material obstacles as if they could hear us.  We call the season inconstant or deceitful, the sun melancholy and unwilling to shine, and we say that the sky threatens snow.  We say that some plants are consumed by heat, that some soils are indomitable, that well cultivated ground is no longer wild, that in a good season the whole landscape smiles and leaps for joy.  A river is called malevolent, and a lake swallows up men; the earth is thirsty and sucks up moisture, and plants fear the cold.  The people of Pistoja say that some olive trees will not feel a thrashing, that they are afraid of many things, and that they live on, despising the course of years.  Again, they say that olive trees are not afraid of the pruning knife, and that they rejoice in its use by a skilled hand.  Thousands of such expressions might be adduced, and we refer our readers to Giuliani’s work, “Linguaggio vivente toscano.”

Nor do we only ascribe our own feelings to inanimate things, but we also invest them with the forms and members of the human body.  We speak of the head, shoulder, back, or foot of a mountain, of an arm of the sea, a tongue of land, the mouth of a sea-port, of a cave, or crater.  So again we ascribe teeth to mountains, a front (fronte, forehead) to a house; there is the eye-brow (ciglio) of a ditch, the eye of heaven, a vein of metal, the entrails of a mountain.  The Alps are bald or bare, the soil is wrinkled, objects are sinister or the reverse (sinistra, destra),[24] and a mountain is gigantic ox dwarfish.

In like manner we ascribe our own functions to nature.  The river eats into the land; the whirlpool swallows all which is thrown into it, and the wind whistles, howls and moans; the torrent murmurs, the sun is born and dies, the heavens frown, the fields smile.  This habit is also transferred to moral questions; and we speak of the heart of the question, the leading idea, the body of doctrines, the members of a philosophic system; we infuse new blood into thought.  Truth becomes palpable, a theme is eviscerated, thought is lame, science is childish.  History speaks clearly; there is an embryo of knowledge, a vacillating science; the infancy, youth, maturity, and death of a theory; morality is crass, the spirit meagre or acute; the mind adapts itself, logic is maimed; there is a conflict of ideas, the inspiration of science, truncated thoughts.  Again we talk of the head of the mob, of the foot of the altar or the throne, of the heart of the riot, of the body of an army, of a phalanx, of trampling under foot, duty, decency, and justice.