ANIMISM

 

Primitive man, rapidly whirling a rhomb, believed that its murmuring hum was the voice of a spirit. Why did he not think the noise he made by striking a stick against a tree or clapping stones together was a voice? Perhaps because the hum sounded like speech, sustained and resonant, but a more likely reason is that the cause of the sound was unknown. The uncaused is the product of an unseen creator, an apparently uncaused human behavior is attributed to an inner man.—B. F. Skinner, Notebooks