It is only by seeing something as in some sense and however dimly ‘like’ something else that we build knowledge, and insight consists in perceiving likeness in dissimilar things. Poetic metaphor – describing one thing in terms usually associated with something quite different – is simply the most familiar use of metaphor and it is, of course, linguistic. But linguistic metaphor is, as it were, only a subset of a much broader mode of human perception which, as the mathematicians attest, includes what might be called non-linguistic metaphor. This broader conception of metaphor is central to
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