It can be said the mind can deal in intangibles like using metaphor, mainly since the emergence of human language. We often see two different things being tied into a relationship, a comparison is achieved rhetorically using figures of speech, though not things that are literally the same. (allegory, hyperbole, allusion & simile...even parables)
"All the world is a stage"
"Peter was the rock of the Church"
This quotation contains a metaphor because the world is not literally a stage. By figuratively asserting that the world is a stage, Shakespeare uses the points of comparison between the world and a stage to convey an understanding about the mechanics of the world and the lives of the people within it.
An example relating to law and economics is the metaphor used by Plato:
"But those who have loved their money are twice as attached to it as others; for as poets love their poems and fathers their children, just so do money-makers love their money, not only for its use, as do others, but because it is their own production.
Here he is alluding to the idea of "having" which is a concept that lead to the significance of possession,sounds so much like something Jesus would have said? ahem..
(And how we define matter has changed, we have seen a completely expanded view of our ideas of matter since Newton, whatever exists now in the time/space continnuum which does include particles that behave like waves etc) |
