Subanimate

There were far-off, indistinct echoes of life, and subanimate mutterings, the slow respirations of the rocks, drinking air and oozing moisture through their sluggish pores, swelling and pushing against their straitening bonds of timber.

[…] the vanguard of science may now have left atomistic mechanism behind and abandoned deterministic explanations of even the subanimate world, but general and humane culture are influenced more by the scientific culture of the age of Newton than […]