Ants are as completely Socialistic as any community can possibly be, yet they put to death any ant which strays among them by mistake from a neighboring ant-heap. Men do not differ much from ants, as regards their instincts in this respect, wherever there is a great divergence of race, as between white men and yellow men.
Russell, Proposed Roads to Freedom (1920)
The human instinct for mating and ritual is another often compared to animal life.
That some repent no one can doubt; but I am inclined to believe that most men and women take their lots as they find them, marrying as the birds do by force of nature, and going on with their mates with a general, though not perhaps an undisturbed satisfaction. . . .
Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1864)
Boys, like dogs, have a sort of romantic ritual which is not always their real selves. And this romantic ritual is generally the ritual of not being romantic; the pretence of being much more masculine and materialistic than they are.
Chesterton, Simmons and the Social Tie (1910)
War elephants and their instincts have been pressed into laudable rhetorical service. They have a minor but irreplaceable role in the lexicon of metaphor.
The generals made use of him for his talent of railing, which, kept within government, proved frequently of great service to their cause, but, at other times, did more mischief than good; for, at the least touch of offence, and often without any at all, he would, like a wounded elephant, convert it against his leaders.
Swift, The Battle of the Books (1697)
What the condition of this country will be, when its standing army is composed of dwarfs, with here and there a wild man to throw its ranks into confusion, like the elephants employed in war in former times, I leave you to imagine, sir.
Dickens, Threatening Letter to Thomas Hood from An Ancient Gentleman (1844)
He perhaps thought, and not unreasonably, that, like the elephant in the battle, he was quite as likely to trample down his friends as his foes.
Lord Stowell, in Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) (on why Lord North did not want Johnson as an ally in Parliament)
More flattering results are possible when the instincts of a creature are productive.
For the empirical, like the ant, only collects and uses; the rational, like the spider, spins from itself. But the practice of the bee is midway, which draws materials from the flowers of both garden and field, but transmutes and digests them by a faculty of its own. Nor is the work of true philosophy different. . . .
Bacon, Thoughts and Observations Concerning the Interpretation of Nature (1620)
Or consider Henry Adams’ discussion of grisaille – painting in shades of gray:
Grisaille is a separate branch of colour-decoration which belongs with the whole system of lighting and fenetrage, and will have to remain a closed book because the feeling and experience which explained it once are lost, and we cannot recover either. Such things must have been always felt rather than reasoned, like the irregularities in plan of the builders; the best work of the best times shows the same subtlety of sense as the dog shows in retrieving, or the bee in flying, but which tourists have lost.
Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904)
Where a human trait or behavior is ambiguous (it might be the expression of something high or low), comparison to an animal can distinguish the possibilities.
The few odd minutes I have had to spare I have given to Plato, recurring to his Symposium after fifty years; with a translation alongside I find the Greek easy. My successive reflections have been these: How natural the talk. But it is the “first intention” common to the classics. They have not a looking glass at each end of their room, and their simplicity is the bark of a dog, not the simplicity of art.
Holmes, Jr., letter to Frederick Pollock (1911)
6. Hybrid cases. Because animals and humans are superficially similar, it is easy to impute human qualities and feelings to animals – and then to turn the resulting picture around, with a person compared to an animal said to have certain of its (human) traits. In effect the animal is anthropomorphized, then compared back to the human to make the latter more vivid. Some cases of this kind involve human attributes assigned broadly to certain types of creatures.
His countenance had a strongly masculine cast; not properly human, but such as we see in the bull, the goat, or the domestic boar; something equivocal and wheedling, something greedy, brutal, and dangerous.
Stevenson, The Sire de Maletroit’s Door (1882)
Mr. Lush felt a triumph that was mingled with much distrust; for Grandcourt had said no word to him about her, and looked as neutral as an alligator; there was no telling what might turn up in the slowly-churning chances of his mind.
Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)
He had a round face, too, like a walrus; and with about the same expression, half human and half indescribable.
Melville, Redburn (1849)
Human qualities also may be associated not just with a whole species but with a particular animal in a comparison – to invoke not the lowliness of the dog generally, but the more particular disposition of the dog that has been kicked. The conduct or inner state of the animal is described with words that normally apply to people, making the result partly human and causing the comparison to feel closer.
I told him, he was not sensible of the danger, having lain under cover in the boat during the storm: he was like the chicken, that hides its head under its wing, and then thinks itself safe.
Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785)
Don’t get the expression of a vicious cur that appears to know the kicks it gets are its desert, and yet hates all the world, as well as the kicker, for what it suffers.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
[T]he house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all storybooks, fairy tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.
Dickens, Bleak House (1853)
More extreme cases – not necessarily metaphorical, but in place here – enjoyably hypothesize what an animal would think or say if it could.
Somebody quoted to him with admiration the soliloquy of an officer who had lived in the wilds of America: “Here am I, free and unrestrained, amidst the rude magnificence of nature, with the Indian woman by my side, and this gun, with which I can procure food when I want it! What more can be desired for human happiness?” “Do not allow yourself, sir,” replied Johnson, “to be imposed upon by such gross absurdity. It is sad stuff; it is brutish. If a bull could speak, he might as well exclaim, ‘Here am I with this cow and this grass; what being can enjoy greater felicity?”
Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791)
In the two new volumes Johnson says, and very probably did, or is made to say, that
Jr., The Common Law (1888)
