of bodily intersections with the world—so, for instance, “perswade” means “make sweet,” “inform” means “give shape to,” “delight” leans on the Latin for “attract,” and so on. There are in fact two forms of metaphor to be considered, and distinguished from one another—a point not lost on Boyle’s contemporaries. On the one hand, there is metaphor as a rhetorical substitution of one word or phrase (with all its attendant baggage) for another. This is the painted eyeglass. On the other, there is metaphor as the linkage between material world and ideal pattern, between sensory rudiments and their conceptual wages. This is “perswade,” “inform,” “delight.” The first sort of metaphor has its uses, even in the plain style, though it is met with general distrust. As Locke reminds us, such rhetorical substitution is “fancy passing for knowledge”; “what is prettily said,” Locke elegantly continues, “is taken for solid.”56 But the second sort is a necessary element in the linguistic linking of ideas and things, the guarantee, in fact, that mental work may be traced to a material foundation; it insinuates the central mandate of the empiricist project, to seek knowledge “in the consideration of the things themselves,” into the texture of the medium used to carry out that project.57 What is more, and this is really the critical thing, this second sort of metaphor was witnessed as the critical linkage making possible the construction of a mental reality patterned on the world of things. As Locke notes, “it may lead us a little towards the original of all our notions and knowledge, if we remark how great a dependence our words have on common sensible ideas.”58 This is, of course, a metaphor theory of language, which rises in the early empiricist tradition to underwrite conceptual knowledge generally.59 Metaphor registers the conviction that arises from our regular experience of the connections between objects and effects.60
Thomas Reid insists, disapproving the whole time, that the “terms and phrases, by which the operations of the mind are expressed in all languages … are drawn from supposed similitude of body to mind.”61 Reid’s project voices a doubt—one that I share—that metaphor itself invents a distinction between embodied action and conceptual understanding in order to stitch it back together; it may be, as an important counter-strand of theorists have all along suspected, that there is in the end no reason to establish the distinction in the first place. This doubt is raised by John Milton (Exhibit 2), among others, and will be a recurrent theme of this book. For now, it is enough to note that metaphor is the critical mechanism that is made repeatedly to guarantee the answering of the mental world to the call of the physical, and vice versa. “Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact,” Ralph Waldo Emerson would later remind us, is “found to be borrowed from some material appearance.”62 Indeed, “express” is itself such a borrowing (noticed by Milton), shifting patterns obtaining in a material source domain into a conceptual target: express means “breathe out,” and this is precisely what Emerson and Reid and Milton have done; they have breathed mental operations into language. As the earlier Samuel Johnson63 remarked in his correspondence with George Berkeley, the mind can only make itself known to itself through such “expressions (modifications, impressions, etc…)” which “are metaphorical,” which rely on relations between the sensory objects. This is how expression works—just like “modification” or “impression,” two similarly vexed metaphors. “It is scarce possible,” Johnson concluded, “to speak of the mind without a metaphor.”64
Metaphor is in this sense the leaning of concepts on haptic experience; as it is true in cases of metaphor, so, too, is it true for “metaphor” itself, all along and right from the beginning, even for the person who inaugurates the claim that metaphor is a sort of “ornament.” This is the view of Aristotle, who lists metaphor among his list of rhetorical choices, thinking, of course, of metaphor in the sense of the painted eyeglass. As Paul Ricoeur notices, however, in order “to explain metaphor … Aristotle creates a metaphor, one borrowed from the realm of movement,” for “metaphor” simply means “transfer,” “translate,” or “carry across.” “The word metaphor” Ricoeur continues, “itself is therefore metaphorical because it is borrowed from an order other than that of language,” thereby offering a special form not just of language but of “all meaningful linguistic entities.”65 And where else could this other order be, for Aristotle or anyone else in his tradition, but in the evidence of the senses, which after all provide (by Aristotle’s account) everything that is in the mind? Where else might concepts be referred, but toward embodied experience, what Ricoeur calls “movement”? This haptic twist, the grounding of language in embodiment, has more recently been called the “bottoming out” of metaphor, where the endless cycles of linguistic reference, of conceptual frames defined by means of other, analogous frames, ultimately ground themselves in “an order other than that of language.”66 Such “absolute metaphors,” Hans Blumenberg elsewhere avers, are the “foundational elements of philosophical language.” They are “translations,” he insists (hearing the etymology of metaphor),67 which “resist being converted back into authenticity and logicality.” They touch a structured experience of being in the world.68 The critical thing to notice is that this work of metaphor, operating silently but continually to link sense to idea, idea to sense, does not fly in the face of empiricist rationality; it is in fact a product of the long empiricist movement, stretching from its very early formulation in De Anima and depositing itself in the seminal work of men like Boyle, Locke, and even Berkeley. For a wide range of eighteenth-century writers, the plain style emerged as a careful management of a language foisted upon metaphor, and was experienced as such. The plain style was in this sense an accomplishment in the management and rerouting of cognitive contact with the world through an inherited set of semiotic displacements, a revivifying of the dead metaphors of language.69
It is worth insisting on this because the usual story of cognition and metaphor starts with a handful of thinkers in the twentieth century. Beginning with Max Black, this tradition swept aside what they called the long-standing “comparison” theory of metaphor (metaphor as painted eyeglass) in order to rediscover a different vector of metaphor as a fundamental element in cognitive work.70 But these insights have been built into metaphor from the start; witness Aristotle’s “metaphor,” as “carrying across.” And as Aristotle witnessed metaphor in these two forms, so too the major defenders of the plain style, Locke among them, generally avoided metaphor of the rhetorical sort, even while rigorously subscribing to a metaphor theory of language. Metaphor indeed provided the stability of meaning. Viewed in this context, these thinkers constructed a model of linguistic expression that looks to modern eyes strikingly like the seeds of a situated account of cognition. The difference is that Locke and others turned to metaphor in part to witness the distinction that they expected it to erase; metaphor helped shore up a distinction between mind and body even while it sought to coordinate them. The metaphor “the mind is a collection” historically emerges as a summary example of this tendency. On the one hand, it serves to distinguish mind from body, idea from thing: as the world is out there, so it is in here too, container to container. In this sense, metaphor developed out of the conviction that the mind was distinct from the collections it took for its models. On the other, it coordinates a more general linkage between object and idea, the assertion that the mind might be a true reflection or microcosm for the world it perceives.71 This is the latticework of metaphor, continually reminding us that ideas retain, and refer us to, their somatic origins. Accordingly, the widespread conviction that the mind was a collection helped invent the distinction between “out there” and “in here”—even while relying for the distinction upon complex methods of stitching them back together. Metaphor, in this sense, creates the basic problem of epistemology that it seeks to solve, both opening and partially closing the question of how the mind comes to know the world in which it moves.
Cognitive Ecologies
The traditional way to think of metaphor is as a one-way vector from source domain toward the target or figurative domain.72 The most intuitive reading of Augustan theories of the mind’s conservative work is that they depended upon the material models available:
