The impulse to romanticize something – anything, really – is innate to the human species.
Now the typical mechanic working on AC electric motor repair, for instance, probably just deals with his or her work as-is, without undue distractions of the type that may be characterized as “romantic.”
But in other aspects of life a significant amount of people are wont to ascribe meaning to the random and, in Goethe’s famous warning, assign meaninglessness to the semantically significant.

As a result, imagine if that same mechanic, the one performing some AC electric motor repair or other, should then attribute anthropomorphic features to some aspect of the work involved.
Say a sudden spark was taken to be an omen of divine displeasure, or a mysteriously crushed bearing should somehow propose unseen supernatural agencies.
We’d regard these proclamations baseless and, furthermore, absolutely ridiculous – yet for some reason we accord undue respect to very similar pronouncements made of rather parallel circumstances.

Therefore, an accurate prediction of a volcano eruption results in a successful evacuation with no lives lost, as in the case just lately on the Caribbean island of Montserrat.
The people praise God in their churches but left unsaid is why the good Lord should ever hassle them with such a threat in the first place!
Isn’t this rather like our mechanic working on AC electric motor repair mistaking natural forces for divine ones?

Yet by a interested quality of our human psychology, we feel the necessity to give thanks – to something.
It’s not good enough to feel grateful; the term itself suggests an object of our gratitude.
Every verb must have a subject, after all: “it” rains…in European languages, there’s always something that does something.
Hence, our very minds are designed to, as it were, imagine an agent behind every action in the world.

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