METAPHOR

(Yunanca köken — orijinale bakınız.) In Rhetoric, a figure by which a word is transferred from the subject to which it properly belongs, and applied to another which has some similitude to its proper subject, with a view to give energy to the expre ion of the former. A comparison or simile (see Comparison) appears to be only a metaphor with the addition of a sign denoting that it has been thus transferred. Thus " the silver moon" is a metaphorical expre ion; the " moon, bright as silver," a comparison. As language advances from the mere indication of sensible objects by names to the expre ion of the feelings and wants of a complicated mode of life, it becomes more and more metaphysical in character, until it is found that a very large proportion of the words in common use are either metaphors, or are words derived from foreign languages, and whose primary sense as derivatives is the same with their secondary or metaphorical sense in the language from which they came. Thus, the English word " character," used a few lines above, is drawn from the metaphysical use of the Greek xapujcnj/), which, in its primary signification, denoted something engraven on a hard substance. Metaphors have been divided by writers on rhetoric into several cla es; but the most appropriate are those which are termed analogical, and which derive their force, not from any actual resemblance between two objects, but from a resemblance between the relations which they bear respectively to certain other objects. Thus " the sea of life" is a common and appropriate metaphor; not from any resemblance between the idea of the visible sea and the complex notion of that abstraction which we term human life, but because there is a fancied similarity between the position of navigators in an uncertain voyage and that of human beings engaged in the manifold scenes of life. [s. 754]