Not Quite The Pathetic Fallacy

"...weather that couldn't quite make up its mind between fog and drizzle and a possibility of snow."
-SM Stirling, A Meeting At Corvallis (New York, 2007), Chapter Two, p. 42.

When I was somewhere between five and seven and the sun was almost hidden behind clouds, I heard one adult say to another, "It's trying to shine." I believed her. Because she said it, I thought that the sun was trying to shine. And I would have continued to believe that if I had grown up in a society where everyone attributed consciousness and motivations to natural phenomena because they had not yet found any other explanation for sunlight, fog, rain or snow. We understand not only the weather but also our ancestors' psychology.