ABSTRACT
Anthropological and archeological data corroboratively suggest that animism is the earliest feature of human cultures. And dolls as cult objects play here a special role. The World of Ideas and the World of People relate to each other from the earliest times via the World of Dolls. A doll is an animated human-like material package of Idea, its Personified Symbol. Once appeared, these Personified Ideas start living their own lives and acquire tremendous power over people. The common thread is that one of them used the phenomenon of human Reflexivity implicitly in his studies, helped by the geometric method, while the other used Reflexivity explicitly, helped by the algebraic method. A few centuries ago the great philosopher Baruch Spinoza in his immortal Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, in a number of wonderful “theorems” showed a human as an “animated automat, driven by the laws of the mind”.
