In childish eyes the world’s alive. Your son bashes a weed with his cardboard sword; he means to punish it for scratching him. Your daughter thinks you turn off all the lights in the house at night so the house can go to sleep. The world is enchanted, but not eerily.

Bruce Charlton has been doing metaphysical experiments. He has tried on the notion that everything is alive in some sense, and found it led him in the direction of happiness and Christ. No surprise there–heaven is childish.

I tried it recently too. One of his commenters was worried about empathizing with things. If you see a being and purpose in gravel, do you have to imagine hurting the gravel as you step on it? At least for me, that wasn’t a problem. My car was cold in the morning, but not chilled. Being cold is a state of being that a machine can experience as a machine. Animizing is not anthropomorphizing.

It was good. I will return for many draughts of this well. But I admit that it was also peculiar. Maybe its not for everyone. I give it a Lincoln recommendation—for those who like that sort of thing, it is just the sort of thing they would like.