Editing Preternatural (section)

==Science==
With the emergence of early modern science, the concept of the preternatural increasingly came to be used to refer to strange or abnormal phenomena that seemed to violate the normal working of nature, but which were not associated with magic and witchcraft. This was a development of the idea that preternatural phenomena were fake miracles. As Daston puts it, "To simplify the historical sequence somewhat: first, preternatural phenomena were demonized and thereby incidentally naturalized; then the demons were deleted, leaving only the natural causes."<ref name = "Lor"/> The use of the term was especially common in medicine, for example in John Brown's ''A Compleat Treatise of Preternatural Tumours'' (1678), or [[William Smellie (obstetrician)|William Smellie]]'s ''A Collection of Preternatural Cases and Observations in Midwifery'' (1754).<ref>Samuel J. Rogal, ''Medicine in Great Britain from the Restoration to the Nineteenth Century, 1660–1800: An Annotated Bibliography'', Greenwood Press, New York, 1992, p.203.</ref>

In the 19th century the term was appropriated in anthropology to refer to folk beliefs about fairies, trolls and other such creatures which were not thought of as demonic, but which were perceived to affect the natural world in unpredictable ways. According to [[Thorstein Veblen]], such preternatural agents were often thought of as forces somewhere between supernatural beings and material processes. "The preternatural agency is not necessarily conceived to be a personal agent in the full sense, but it is an agency which partakes of the attributes of personality to the extent of somewhat arbitrarily influencing the outcome of any enterprise, and especially of any contest."<ref>Veblen, T., ''The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions'', Macmillan, New York, 1915, p.280</ref>

The linguistic association between individual agents and unexplained or unfortunate circumstances remains. Many people attribute occurrences that are known to be material processes, such as "gremlins in the engine", a "bug in the machine", or [[pathetic fallacy|attributing motives to objects]]: "the clouds are threatening". The [[anthropomorphism]] in our daily life is a combination of the above cultural stems, as well as the manifestation of our pattern-projecting minds.{{Original research inline|date=June 2015}}