He had won his every battle against inanimate nature; but this was a battle he lost.
The author says that this animist belief is due to a projection of man's awareness of his own teleonomic functioning onto inanimate nature.
He looked about, awed in his blood by this singular and not unpleasant confrontation with inanimate nature.
Finally he moves on to animals and inanimate nature.
The goal of the Gestaltists was to integrate the facts of inanimate nature, life, and mind into a single scientific structure.
The "pathetic fallacy" is defined in the dictionary as "the ascription of human traits or feelings to inanimate nature."
An analogy is drawn between mind and some emergent behavior seen in inanimate nature, such as Rayleigh-Bénard convection.
Those who "sport only with inanimate nature" are useless but innocent, but those who perform cruel experiments on animals are "a race of wretches".
Perhaps these "silent monsters" were a metaphor for the various forces of inanimate nature with which any engineer must struggle as he builds.
When happy, inanimate nature had the power of bestowing on me the most delightful sensations.