In the play, the children were allowed to thump the floor lustily, as a presentation of their watery functions! It was unconscionably funny. Fancy presenting even the crudest image of the mighty sea, surging up on the shore, by a row of infants squatted on the floor and pounding with their fists! Such pitfalls can be avoided by the simple rule of personifying only characters that actually behave like human beings.英文原著 · 《How To Tell Stories To Children》
This term is the plain expression of the fact; Natural Selection is a metaphorical expression of it, and to a certain degree indirect and incorrect, since, even personifying Nature, she does not so much select special variations as exterminate the most unfavourable ones.英文原著 · 《More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume I》
It is evidently also necessary not to personify "Nature" too much--though I am very apt to do it myself--since people will not understand that all such phrases are metaphors. Natural Selection is, when understood, so necessary and self-evident a principle, that it is a pity it should be in any way obscured; and it therefore seems to me that the free use of "survival of the fittest," which is a compact and accurate definition of it, would tend much to its being more widely accepted, and prevent it being so much misrepresented and misunderstood.英文原著 · 《More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume I》
Make Hope resound within this altitude;
Thou knowest as oft thou dost personify it
As Jesus to the three gave greater clearness."--英文原著 · 《Paradiso》
In other words, those great judges, although of course aware that a ship is no more alive than a mill-wheel, thought that not only the law did in fact deal with it as if it were alive, but that it was reasonable that the law should do so. The reader will observe that they do not say simply that it is reasonable on grounds of policy to [30] sacrifice justice to the owner to security for somebody else but that it is reasonable to deal with the vessel as an offending thing. Whatever the hidden ground of policy may be, their thought still clothes itself in personifying language.英文原著 · 《The Common Law》
Again, the appointment of an executor relates back to the date of the testator's death. The continuity of person [345] is preserved by this fiction, as in Rome it was by personifying the inheritance ad interim.英文原著 · 《The Common Law》