September 30, 2025 • 24 mins
Explores the pervasive use of metaphors related to the mind, soul, and human experience in eighteenth-century literature and thought. The author details their methodology for compiling a dictionary of these metaphors, emphasizing the use of digital humanities tools and a "desultory reading" approach to sift through vast amounts of text. Key thematic entries discussed include animals, coinage, empire, legal judgment, interiority (rooms), impressions, and writing, each illustrating how figurative language shaped understanding of the self, society, and abstract concepts during the period. The text also touches upon the tension between literal and figurative meanings, and the impact of changing social and technological contexts on metaphorical expression.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
How do we even begin to describe something as intangible,
as elusive as our own minds? Think about it? We
almost always reach for physical comparisons, right, we talk about
like heavy thoughts or a sharp mind. But what if
those comparisons don't just describe our minds? What if they actually,
you know, shape what we think the mind is. Today
we're taking a deep dive into a truly unique source,
(00:21):
a scholarly well. They call it a dictionary titled Metaphors
of Mind, an eighteenth century dictionary. And this isn't just
some dry academic text. It's really the culmination of years
of meticulous work by its author, a groundbreaking effort. Actually,
it blended old school archival research, you know, digging through
dusty papers with cutting edge digital analysis. I mean, imagine
(00:42):
the dedication manually noting metaphors found in obscure texts. They're
using these huge digital databases and even dealing with like
ancient typos and scanning errors. It's a fascinating story of
discovery just in itself, and it perfectly mirrors the deep
dive we're about to take. The core idea here, And
what's truly fascinating is how this book argues that eighteenth
century empiricism, that powerful idea that all knowledge comes from
(01:04):
our sensory experience, was itself profoundly figurative. Here's the aha moment, right,
If our ideas are derived from the physical world, then
the mind had to describe itself using the very terms
of that world. Essentially, the mind declare what it was
by saying it was something else exactly.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
And what's so compelling about this concept of figurative empiricism,
as you called it, is how deeply ingrained metaphor was
in the eighteenth centuries understanding of the mind. This wasn't
just you know, poetic flare. It reflected fundamental philosophical assumptions
of the era. Eighteenth century thinkers were really grappling with
how to understand something immaterial, the mind, using only material terms.
(01:43):
This often meant relying on what the book calls linguistic dualism,
where their language and trying to bridge that gap between
mind and body actually ended up reinforcing the idea that
they were separate things. And here's the kicker. This dualism,
as the source points out, continues to influence how we
talk about the mind, even to unconsciously. Often so we're
gonna explore this rich lexicon of metaphors of mind. I
(02:05):
mean everything from the wildness of animals to the precision
of coinage, the solemnity of courtrooms, the vastness of empires.
Each one reveals a piece of the changing intellectual landscape
of the era, and by the end you'll see how
these historical linguistic choices while they continue to shape our
understanding of ourselves.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Okay, let's start with the first one. You mentioned, animals
picturing the mind is what an arc or.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
A zoo, Yeah, something like that. The eighteenth century loved
seeing the self through the lens of animals. This really
reflects the widespread belief in what was known as the
Great Chain of being, this hierarchy that ranked all existence
from the lowest forms right up to the divine, and
humans were kind of perched precariously in the middle. So
you find this veritable menagerie of metaphorical animals in the literature, birds, bulls, horses,
(02:51):
even humble things like cockles and oysters. They were used
to illustrate the era's ongoing tensions between ranking human nature
and maybe leveling it. For instance, the philosoph for John
Locke in his epistle to the Reader, he pictured the
human mind as both quarry and hunter within itself.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Wow, like predator and prey inside your own head exactly.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
It's almost a predatory internal landscape. And that ancient idea
famously pushed by Thomas Hobbes that man is a wolf
to man it underscores this internal struggle. And beyond these
sort of external comparisons, the mind itself was often seen
as an internal menagerie. Jonathan Swift, the satirist, famously saw
the brain as only a crowd of.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Little animal crowd of animals.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Yeah, and Thomas Willis a prominent anatomist who actually coined
the term neurology. He described what he called animal spirits.
These weren't ghosts, They were like active mechanisms responsible for
both higher and lower mental processes, a crucial point where
humans and beasts kind of connected in their thinking. You
also see specific animals carrying specific symbolic weight. Birds, for example,
(03:54):
frequently symbolized flights of fancy. That goes way back from
Plato's ancient aviary right up to William James's later observations
about thought as flights and perchings. Even religious figures like
the Wesleys used this imagery. They pictured an unredeemed heart
as a cage of birds and big, unclean. And then
there were horses, which are these powerful metaphors.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
For control, control of what passions exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Passions were often depicted as needing to be yoked and
tamed like horses, although sometimes imagination or fancy might be
given for your rain. It just highlights how eighteenth century
thinkers were constantly grappling with this question, how much control
do humans actually have over their own internal world? It's
a big question, right.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, definitely. Okay, So from animals to coins that feels
like a big jump. But you said they linked the
mind to currency.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Oh absolutely. Here's where it gets really interesting. Imagine your
thoughts were literally currency the eighteenth century. Remember it was
a period deeply concerned with economic shifts trade value, so
linking the mind and self to coins made a lot
of sense to them. This metaphor provided an incredibly rich
framework they could explore intrinsic versus extrinsic value, personal identity,
(05:04):
even political stability through it. Ideas were literally coined. William
King described John Locke's ideas as coined in his mind
like a shilling like new thoughts were being minted.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Damped onto the mind, like we said earlier, with impressions.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Precisely, and Epictetus, the ancient philosopher, saw impressions not stamped
upon his mind as a person's true property, like money.
You accept it if it's good, you rejected if it's counterfeit. Essentially,
and this idea extended to character itself. Samuel Johnson, you know,
in his famous Dictionary, defined talent not like we use
(05:36):
it now, but meaning a faculty or gift. As a
metaphor from the Bible, from Holy writ He noted that
preachers had long seen a piece of metal like in
the Parable of the Talents, as a symbol for a person.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Ah okay, I see the connection.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
And you can see the political implications too. The big
recoinage in sixteen ninety six, replacing old, worn out coins
with new ones that was seen as an illustration of
the nation's desire for continuity, for stability under the new monarch.
Then there's the infamous case of William Dodd, the macroni Parson,
this clergyman who was actually hanged for forgery in seventeen seventy.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Seven, hanged for forgery Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
It powerfully highlighted that thin line between authentic and counterfeit,
and even how public perception could create a kind of
pounterfeit image of a person.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Wow, it makes you wonder, doesn't it. How do we
perceive authenticity today when so much of our identity is
like digital and easily copied or faked. Okay, So thoughts
is currency, mind minted, maybe counterfeited? How did they picture
the minds in a working send?
Speaker 2 (06:34):
You mentioned a courtroom, Yes, the court of conscience. This
was a truly powerful and ubiquitous metaphor really common within
this internal tribunal. You had the senses providing testimony, passions,
bringing suits or cases, and presiding judge. Within this judge
was often located metaphorically in the bosom or breast, and
they rendered verdicts like an internal trial exactly. And you
(06:56):
have to remember this was a great century for constitutional theorists, judges, lawyers.
Their rhetoric, their way of speaking was just saturated with
legal language. So philosophers and theologians were actively looking for
these innate metaphysical laws of nature that structured the self,
and these often ended up resembling the British common law system.
They lived under. There was also this fascinating tension between
(07:19):
public and private conscience. Thomas Hobbes, for example, he argued
that the law is the public conscience. So he basically
saw private conscience as just a metaphorical internalization of public judgment.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Which is quite different from thinking of yourself as totally independent,
making your own rules.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Very different. And you see novelists playing with this. Henry
Fielding and Tom Jones. He cleverly used this idea. He
personified Tom's internal sense of judgment, this somewhat inside him
with a real respected judge, Lord High Chancellor Philip Yorke.
It shows how judgment could be both a legal and
an aesthetic act, like judging art or character. And the
(07:55):
writer Lawrence Stern he pushed it even further in his
novel Tristram Shandy. That book deliberately flouted all the conventional
rules of novel writing at the time. It's almost as
if his artistic conscience gave him permission to just set
aside tradition and do his own thing.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Okay, so internal courts, that's quite an image. Let's connect
this to the bigger picture. Now, beyond courts, you said,
the mind was also seen as a kind.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Of empire, a sprawling empire. Yes, this potent metaphor really
reflects the era's massive global imperial ambitions, but kind of
miniaturized within the individual. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, famously said,
whensoever the Roman conquers, he inhabits. And this idea very
much extended to the mind's inner territories.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
So the mind is territory to be controlled.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Governed, mapped, maybe even conquered. Richard Blackmore described the soul
high seated in her throne, the brain, extending that whole
body as kingdom metaphor. In this view, organs become regions,
and those animal spirits we mentioned they act as ministers
of the court. The mind becomes a landscape to be ruled.
(08:58):
Conquest and invasion were central fears here. John Locke's philosophy,
for instance, saw rights and property as being susceptible to invasion,
and the mind itself was often described as being forced
to receive the impressions from external objects like an occupied territory.
Locke even talked about confessing the empire of habit, meaning
that struggle against ingrained behaviors like fighting an internal occupier. Similarly,
(09:21):
the brain was imagined as an emporium, a marketplace where
foreign ideas and maybe dangerous luxury goods would pour in,
Much like goods pouring into London from the colonies, there
was danger there too, Definitely. Just as luxury imports were
believed to potentially enervate a nation, weaken its virtue and
lead to decline, the mind could also be undermined by
foreign influences or uncontrolled passions. Sarah Fielding quoted that maxim
(09:45):
it is difficult to conquer the passions, but it is
impossible to satisfy them, really, underscoring this internal struggle for
control for empire and Mary Wollstonecraft, in her vindication of
the rights of women, she brilliantly used this metaphor. She
explored the these sexual and mental politics, exposing the despotic
and tyrannical connotations of empire within relationships. She contrasted Beauty's empire,
(10:08):
which she saw as often fleeting and manipulative, with the
irrational monster of lawless tyrannical power, like a bad emperor
that's powerful, it is, although it's important to note, as
the source points out, that she also used some problematic
language herself, terms like Mahometan strain or Turkish bashaws as
metaphors for male domination. It shows how by the end
(10:29):
of the century, these newer empire metaphors drawn from contemporary
conflicts and stereotypes, were starting to emerge and maybe crowd
out the older Roman ones.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Okay, empires within conquest control. This seems to lead us
naturally to another powerful image. You mentioned the mind in chains.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yes, exactly. Metaphors of fetters, chains, clogs, irons, even grizzlier
instruments of torture were surprisingly common. They were widely used
to describe mental bondage. And this imagery well, it strikingly
mirrored the very real historic context slavery and the burgeoning
abolitionist movement happening at the same time.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
So the medicurs weren't just abstract.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Not entirely. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, for instance, defined to chain
simply as to bring into slavery, and Johnson himself describing
the incredibly hard work of writing a dictionary called the
writer of dictionaries the slave of science a kind of
intellectual bondage. This imagery drew from both internal and external
forms of bondage. You know. Gerard Winstanley, a radical social
(11:28):
reformer from an earlier period but still influential, argued that
the inward bondages of the mind are all occasioned by
the outward bondage of society. And in literature you have
poems like Ander Marvel's Dialogue between the Soul and Body,
where the soul feels enslaved in the physical chains of
nerves and arteries and veins. And remember, this period saw
(11:48):
the rapid expansion of the Royal African Company, which literally
branded in slaved Africans with the initials of its patron.
That gives a really grim literal context to these metaphors
of mental chains. Philosophical you get some surprising twists. David
Hume famously declared reason is and not only to be
the slave of the passions.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Wait, reason is the slave, not the master exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
This was a huge revaluation, prioritizing sentiment feeling over strict
cold rationality. Reason's role was to serve the passions, not
rule them. But fetters weren't always grim. They could also
be softer, like soft, amorous entanglements. The poet Alexander Pope
spoke of mighty hearts held in slender chains and the
(12:30):
chain of love and Phyllis Wheatley, a truly groundbreaking African
American poet of the era. She strikingly described reverie daydreaming
as a kind of soft captivity. She wrote about silken
fetters binding the mind, while paradoxically the unbounded soul is
actually set free.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
That's fascinating, chains that liberate.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
It's a beautiful paradox, isn't it. It shows how these
metaphors of confinement could simultaneously evoke liberation or connection.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Okay, let's shift gear slightly. We talked about impressions being
stamped on the mind like wax impact that a bit more,
how do they see thoughts actually forming right?
Speaker 2 (13:03):
The mind as a surface receiving impressions. This metaphor picturing
the mind as a wax tablet or tabula rasa blank
slate receiving a stamp or impression was absolutely central to
eighteenth century empiricism, especially to the philosophy of John Locke.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
The blank slate idea exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Locke famously explained how simple ideas come from sensation using
this metaphor of wax. He said the wax could be
overhardened with cold, making it hard to impress or maybe
it was too soft, or perhaps the seal the experience
wasn't applied with a sufficient force, resulting in just an
obscure print, a phizzy idea. He used this specifically to
argue against the idea of innate principles, you know, ideas
(13:44):
supposedly stamped upon the mind of man from birth. No,
he insisted all ideas come from experience, and the word
stamp itself was incredibly versatile back then. Johnson's dictionary list's
meanings from like a foot stomping to a mark, a picture,
official authority, currency, intrinsic.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Value, so it could mean many things at once.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Precisely, this multiplicity allowed it to adapt to all sorts
of different theories of the self. You could have heart
stamped like coinage, or souls bearing divine seals, and this
transport of impressions from the physical body to the immaterial
mind was crucial. How did that happen? The book highlights
again how linguistic dualism reinforced mind body dualism. Here they
(14:23):
used metaphor to try and bridge that gap between matter
and mind, even if the actual how the mechanism remained
unspecified or deferred.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
So the metaphor stood in for a scientific explanation they
didn't have.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Yet you could say that it did the conceptual work,
even if the physics wasn't understood.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Okay, So from wax to metal you mentioned the mind
being forged or refined.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Absolutely, that's another key cluster of metaphors. The soul could
be tempered or forged like steel, thoughts and passions could
be refined like separating precious metal from ore, and the
heart could be steeled, melted, or coined. Your character, your temperament,
the very stuff you were made of was your metal,
right but clearly related to m etal And just like
(15:05):
a precious metal, your metal could be tested put through
fire to see its quality. Alexander Pope, in his essay
on Man, used the idea of mercury being mixed into
human nature. He suggested the draws, cements, what else were
too refined, implying that maybe even impurities flaws contributes something
essential to human nature and devotional literature. Religious writing often
(15:27):
depicted death as the ultimate refiner, the process that finally
separates the soul's precious metal from the drossy body. It's
also interesting how this played out in terms of social class.
Samuel Boden, a poet, explicitly figured the laboring class mind
as a mind. He wrote about how bright genius sparkles
through a humble mind despite poverty, containing useful minerals like lead,
(15:48):
maybe not gold, but still valuable.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Interesting and base metals right.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
Brass and bronze often signified negative qualities like impudence or
lack of real value. Sir Robert Walpole, a very powerful statesman,
was even nick named Sir Robert Brath by his opponents. Yeah,
and the source notes importantly that travel literature sometimes quite
problematically applied darker base metals to describe the faces of
foreign people's Indians, Turks, Native Americans, although there was this
(16:15):
paradox where a character could still be described as having
the fairest mind in a dark colored case. So it
wasn't always straightforwardly racist, but the potential was definitely there.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Okay, let's move to another one. The mind is a
mirror that seems pretty intuitive reflecting the world.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
It does seem interative, doesn't it, And the mirror metaphor
was indeed pervasive. It described the mind's ability to reflect nature,
to receive those impressions we talked about, and even to
contemplate its own self image. Now, some literary historians like MH.
Abrams argued there was a big shift from an Enlightenment
mirror where the mind passively reflects external reality, to a
(16:51):
Romantic lamp, where the mind actively projects its own light,
its own creativity.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Right, mirror versus lamp.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Yeah, it's a famous distinction, But this Bok's research actually
challenges that simple picture. It nites that mirror metaphors didn't
disappear with Romanticism. They actually increased as the eighteenth century closed.
And even a key Romantic poet like William Wordsworth himself
claimed that the mind of man as natural the mirror
of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature. So
(17:18):
not a lamp, but a mirror. And these weren't just
passive mirrors in their conception either. Think about actual mirrors
in eighteenth century homes. They were often installed strategically to
illuminate the room, reflecting sunlight from outside and multiplying the
light from candles inside. They did something, ah.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
So they weren't just passive reflectors exactly.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
And John Locke back to him, described the understanding as
an eye and the mind as a mirror. He said
the mind can no more refuse to have nor alter
when ideas are imprinted than amer can refuse, alter, or
obliterate the images or ideas which the objects set before
it do therein produce. That passage is really central to
(17:57):
the idea of the mind's passive reception of impression. But
what's fascinating is the ambiguity that creeps in the way
it's phrased. Sometimes the mirror itself could almost be construed
as a mind, and as the source points out, the
metaphor constantly figures depth and erases boundaries, tricking us out
of ourselves. Is the mirror inside us or outside? Is
it the poem reflecting the world or the poet's mind
(18:18):
reflecting itself? It gets complicated.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Okay, So if the mind is reflecting the world or
maybe itself, where does it actually live? You mentioned it
was pictured as a room often.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Yes, the eighteenth century frequently envisioned the mind or parts
of it as an inmost room, maybe a closet or study,
a private space for secret thoughts, for withdrawal, meditation, maybe writing.
Renee de Karte, the philosopher, famously developed his whole epistemology
while secluded in a small stove, heated room, a pole.
(18:48):
He was seeking a mind quite free from prejudices, this
kind of ultimate fantasy of.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Withdrawal, locking himself away to think clearly, precisely.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
And even Daniel Dafoe's Robinson Crusoe, stranded on his Eye Island,
reflected that he found much more solitude in the middle
of the greatest collection of mankind in the world, back
in London than on his supposedly desolate island. Solitude was internal.
This imagery even extended sometimes to the anatomy of the mine,
or what they thought was the anatomy. Joseph Addison, in
(19:17):
his Spectator Essays wrote the satirical piece where he dissected
a bow's head a fashionable young man. He finds the
pineal gland, which discartes thought was the seed of the soul,
and reports that it smells of essence and orange flower
water and was encompassed with mirrors.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Mirrors inside the head.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Yeah, reflecting a soul basically contemplating its own beauties. It
portrays the soul as partitioned, having its own private, maybe narcissistic,
little apartment in the brain, and often these inmost rooms
of the mind were described in quite grand terms, royal
or aristocratic terms like a presence chamber where sovereign mind
sits and presides over all the sensory information coming in.
(19:54):
But you know, private spaces could quickly become public, like
in Fielding's Tom Jones Mollie's wicked rug in her ends
up betraying her secret thoughts and actions. The private becomes evidence,
and the mind could also be seen as a treasure
house that needed to be locked shut. Alexander Pope wrote
of one jingling padlock on the mind. There's even a
humorous poem by Matthew Pryor and English Padlock about a
(20:16):
jealous husband trying desperately to lock his wife's mind, but
he learns she can just prick her mind like pricking
a message onto paper and correspond through the keyhole. Anyway,
you can't really lock up thoughts exactly. This dizzying back
and forth between literal locks and figurative mental locks. It
underscores how metaphors of confinement are doubled in the dualisms
(20:37):
of the eighteenth century body and mind, public and private, locked.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
And unlocked, okay, which brings us finally to writing itself.
How did the very act of writing shape the image
of the mind.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
This is a huge one. The eighteenth century frequently used
writing metaphors, most famously the tabula rasa or blank slate.
That concept we associate strongly with lock, but actually it
was much more broadly used. It wasn't just and empiricist thing.
All sorts of thinkers used it.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
The mind as empty paper waiting to be written on.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Pretty much. The basic idea was that experience inscribes a
blank slate, memory becomes a written record, and the heart
or the soul could be engraved with tenets of belief,
like commandments etched in stone. And then Samuel Richardson's novels,
especially Carissa, which was enormously popular, had a profound effect.
They really shaped the increase of writing metaphors in the
(21:25):
mid eighteenth century around the seventeen fifties and sixties, his
technique epistolary writing telling the story through letters, conflated thought
itself with the act of letter writing. Characters like Clarissa
could write to the moment with their thoughts, keeping pace
with her pen, so reading.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
The letters felt like reading their minds in real time exactly.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
It created this incredible immediacy immersing the reader directly into
the character's mental process. It felt like you were right
there inside her head as things were happening, and Richardson
used it deliberately. Clarissa's delicate and even mind is seen
in the very cut of her letters, the style the
handwriting implied, and crucially, after her traumatic rape, her disordered
(22:05):
mind is pictured as a disordered page, fragmented, maybe blotted.
This powerfully reinforced the idea of the self as a
kind of text, legible or perhaps illegible to those who
knew how to read it. Signs and the chapter concludes
with this truly profound, almost visceral detail. Much of the
ink us in the eighteenth century was made from galls,
which are actually tumor like growths and oak trees caused
(22:25):
by wasps mixed with ferrous sulfate iron salts.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Ink made from tree tumors.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Yeah, iron gall ink. It's very dark, very permanent. So
when Chlorissa, in her despair, dips her pen and ink
in gall and writes, it becomes this incredibly potent image.
It's an indelible picture. The sources a physical act using
this bitter substance that almost literally challenges our ability to discriminate,
figurative and literal. Is the gall just ink or is
(22:51):
it her bitterness and suffering made manifest on the page. Wow,
it's a stunning example, really showing how literary history, when
you dig into these meticulous details, can reveal just how
deeply linguistic dualism reinforced mind body dualism throughout the entire era.
The physical ink becomes inseparable from the mental anguish.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
That's incredible. What we've really explored today is a testament,
isn't it to how language doesn't just describe reality. It
seems it actively creates it, or at least shapes our
perception of it. The eighteenth century, with its vivid animals,
precise coins, solemn quartz, vast empires, binding fetters, shaping impressions,
refining metals, reflecting mirrors, intimate rooms, and these textual writing metaphors,
(23:30):
they gave us such a dynamic picture of the mind,
all drawn from the physical world around them. It really
shows us that our very conception of the mind is,
as the book puts it, a conjuries of metaphors. Just
this collection of borrowed forms, borrowed ideas from material culture,
and the source ends by discussing something truly mind bending,
this idea of mutual metaphor.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Ah. Yeah, that's where the lines blur completely.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Right, where the distinction between the literal thing being described
a tenor and the figurative thing it's compared to the vehicle,
it just collapses. They become like on equal footing. It
uses John Denham's poem Cooper's Hill as an example, talking
about a river, and the river in the palm is
both a literal hydrological description, it's just a river and
(24:14):
it's a stream of ideas. At that point the book says,
it's no longer really important which is the vehicle and
which is the tenor. They've merged. So this leaves us
with a fascinating final thought for you the listener, to
maybe chew on if the way we think about the
mind even now it's so deeply intertwined with these historical metaphors,
What new uses for old ones are we perhaps unconsciously
(24:35):
still making today, And maybe even more intriguingly, what entirely
new metaphors drawn from our world, technology, neuroscience, whatever, are
shaping our understanding of the mind in the twenty first century. Well,
thank you for joining us on this deep dive into
the mind's metaphors. We hope it's given you a useful
shortcut being well informed, and maybe plenty of surprising fats
that think about
How do we even begin to describe something as intangible,
as elusive as our own minds? Think about it? We
almost always reach for physical comparisons, right, we talk about
like heavy thoughts or a sharp mind. But what if
those comparisons don't just describe our minds? What if they actually,
you know, shape what we think the mind is. Today
we're taking a deep dive into a truly unique source,
(00:21):
a scholarly well. They call it a dictionary titled Metaphors
of Mind, an eighteenth century dictionary. And this isn't just
some dry academic text. It's really the culmination of years
of meticulous work by its author, a groundbreaking effort. Actually,
it blended old school archival research, you know, digging through
dusty papers with cutting edge digital analysis. I mean, imagine
(00:42):
the dedication manually noting metaphors found in obscure texts. They're
using these huge digital databases and even dealing with like
ancient typos and scanning errors. It's a fascinating story of
discovery just in itself, and it perfectly mirrors the deep
dive we're about to take. The core idea here, And
what's truly fascinating is how this book argues that eighteenth
century empiricism, that powerful idea that all knowledge comes from
(01:04):
our sensory experience, was itself profoundly figurative. Here's the aha moment, right,
If our ideas are derived from the physical world, then
the mind had to describe itself using the very terms
of that world. Essentially, the mind declare what it was
by saying it was something else exactly.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
And what's so compelling about this concept of figurative empiricism,
as you called it, is how deeply ingrained metaphor was
in the eighteenth centuries understanding of the mind. This wasn't
just you know, poetic flare. It reflected fundamental philosophical assumptions
of the era. Eighteenth century thinkers were really grappling with
how to understand something immaterial, the mind, using only material terms.
(01:43):
This often meant relying on what the book calls linguistic dualism,
where their language and trying to bridge that gap between
mind and body actually ended up reinforcing the idea that
they were separate things. And here's the kicker. This dualism,
as the source points out, continues to influence how we
talk about the mind, even to unconsciously. Often so we're
gonna explore this rich lexicon of metaphors of mind. I
(02:05):
mean everything from the wildness of animals to the precision
of coinage, the solemnity of courtrooms, the vastness of empires.
Each one reveals a piece of the changing intellectual landscape
of the era, and by the end you'll see how
these historical linguistic choices while they continue to shape our
understanding of ourselves.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Okay, let's start with the first one. You mentioned, animals
picturing the mind is what an arc or.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
A zoo, Yeah, something like that. The eighteenth century loved
seeing the self through the lens of animals. This really
reflects the widespread belief in what was known as the
Great Chain of being, this hierarchy that ranked all existence
from the lowest forms right up to the divine, and
humans were kind of perched precariously in the middle. So
you find this veritable menagerie of metaphorical animals in the literature, birds, bulls, horses,
(02:51):
even humble things like cockles and oysters. They were used
to illustrate the era's ongoing tensions between ranking human nature
and maybe leveling it. For instance, the philosoph for John
Locke in his epistle to the Reader, he pictured the
human mind as both quarry and hunter within itself.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Wow, like predator and prey inside your own head exactly.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
It's almost a predatory internal landscape. And that ancient idea
famously pushed by Thomas Hobbes that man is a wolf
to man it underscores this internal struggle. And beyond these
sort of external comparisons, the mind itself was often seen
as an internal menagerie. Jonathan Swift, the satirist, famously saw
the brain as only a crowd of.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Little animal crowd of animals.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Yeah, and Thomas Willis a prominent anatomist who actually coined
the term neurology. He described what he called animal spirits.
These weren't ghosts, They were like active mechanisms responsible for
both higher and lower mental processes, a crucial point where
humans and beasts kind of connected in their thinking. You
also see specific animals carrying specific symbolic weight. Birds, for example,
(03:54):
frequently symbolized flights of fancy. That goes way back from
Plato's ancient aviary right up to William James's later observations
about thought as flights and perchings. Even religious figures like
the Wesleys used this imagery. They pictured an unredeemed heart
as a cage of birds and big, unclean. And then
there were horses, which are these powerful metaphors.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
For control, control of what passions exactly.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
Passions were often depicted as needing to be yoked and
tamed like horses, although sometimes imagination or fancy might be
given for your rain. It just highlights how eighteenth century
thinkers were constantly grappling with this question, how much control
do humans actually have over their own internal world? It's
a big question, right.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, definitely. Okay, So from animals to coins that feels
like a big jump. But you said they linked the
mind to currency.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Oh absolutely. Here's where it gets really interesting. Imagine your
thoughts were literally currency the eighteenth century. Remember it was
a period deeply concerned with economic shifts trade value, so
linking the mind and self to coins made a lot
of sense to them. This metaphor provided an incredibly rich
framework they could explore intrinsic versus extrinsic value, personal identity,
(05:04):
even political stability through it. Ideas were literally coined. William
King described John Locke's ideas as coined in his mind
like a shilling like new thoughts were being minted.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
Damped onto the mind, like we said earlier, with impressions.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Precisely, and Epictetus, the ancient philosopher, saw impressions not stamped
upon his mind as a person's true property, like money.
You accept it if it's good, you rejected if it's counterfeit. Essentially,
and this idea extended to character itself. Samuel Johnson, you know,
in his famous Dictionary, defined talent not like we use
(05:36):
it now, but meaning a faculty or gift. As a
metaphor from the Bible, from Holy writ He noted that
preachers had long seen a piece of metal like in
the Parable of the Talents, as a symbol for a person.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Ah okay, I see the connection.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
And you can see the political implications too. The big
recoinage in sixteen ninety six, replacing old, worn out coins
with new ones that was seen as an illustration of
the nation's desire for continuity, for stability under the new monarch.
Then there's the infamous case of William Dodd, the macroni Parson,
this clergyman who was actually hanged for forgery in seventeen seventy.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Seven, hanged for forgery Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
It powerfully highlighted that thin line between authentic and counterfeit,
and even how public perception could create a kind of
pounterfeit image of a person.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Wow, it makes you wonder, doesn't it. How do we
perceive authenticity today when so much of our identity is
like digital and easily copied or faked. Okay, So thoughts
is currency, mind minted, maybe counterfeited? How did they picture
the minds in a working send?
Speaker 2 (06:34):
You mentioned a courtroom, Yes, the court of conscience. This
was a truly powerful and ubiquitous metaphor really common within
this internal tribunal. You had the senses providing testimony, passions,
bringing suits or cases, and presiding judge. Within this judge
was often located metaphorically in the bosom or breast, and
they rendered verdicts like an internal trial exactly. And you
(06:56):
have to remember this was a great century for constitutional theorists, judges, lawyers.
Their rhetoric, their way of speaking was just saturated with
legal language. So philosophers and theologians were actively looking for
these innate metaphysical laws of nature that structured the self,
and these often ended up resembling the British common law system.
They lived under. There was also this fascinating tension between
(07:19):
public and private conscience. Thomas Hobbes, for example, he argued
that the law is the public conscience. So he basically
saw private conscience as just a metaphorical internalization of public judgment.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Which is quite different from thinking of yourself as totally independent,
making your own rules.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Very different. And you see novelists playing with this. Henry
Fielding and Tom Jones. He cleverly used this idea. He
personified Tom's internal sense of judgment, this somewhat inside him
with a real respected judge, Lord High Chancellor Philip Yorke.
It shows how judgment could be both a legal and
an aesthetic act, like judging art or character. And the
(07:55):
writer Lawrence Stern he pushed it even further in his
novel Tristram Shandy. That book deliberately flouted all the conventional
rules of novel writing at the time. It's almost as
if his artistic conscience gave him permission to just set
aside tradition and do his own thing.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Okay, so internal courts, that's quite an image. Let's connect
this to the bigger picture. Now, beyond courts, you said,
the mind was also seen as a kind.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Of empire, a sprawling empire. Yes, this potent metaphor really
reflects the era's massive global imperial ambitions, but kind of
miniaturized within the individual. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, famously said,
whensoever the Roman conquers, he inhabits. And this idea very
much extended to the mind's inner territories.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
So the mind is territory to be controlled.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Governed, mapped, maybe even conquered. Richard Blackmore described the soul
high seated in her throne, the brain, extending that whole
body as kingdom metaphor. In this view, organs become regions,
and those animal spirits we mentioned they act as ministers
of the court. The mind becomes a landscape to be ruled.
(08:58):
Conquest and invasion were central fears here. John Locke's philosophy,
for instance, saw rights and property as being susceptible to invasion,
and the mind itself was often described as being forced
to receive the impressions from external objects like an occupied territory.
Locke even talked about confessing the empire of habit, meaning
that struggle against ingrained behaviors like fighting an internal occupier. Similarly,
(09:21):
the brain was imagined as an emporium, a marketplace where
foreign ideas and maybe dangerous luxury goods would pour in,
Much like goods pouring into London from the colonies, there
was danger there too, Definitely. Just as luxury imports were
believed to potentially enervate a nation, weaken its virtue and
lead to decline, the mind could also be undermined by
foreign influences or uncontrolled passions. Sarah Fielding quoted that maxim
(09:45):
it is difficult to conquer the passions, but it is
impossible to satisfy them, really, underscoring this internal struggle for
control for empire and Mary Wollstonecraft, in her vindication of
the rights of women, she brilliantly used this metaphor. She
explored the these sexual and mental politics, exposing the despotic
and tyrannical connotations of empire within relationships. She contrasted Beauty's empire,
(10:08):
which she saw as often fleeting and manipulative, with the
irrational monster of lawless tyrannical power, like a bad emperor
that's powerful, it is, although it's important to note, as
the source points out, that she also used some problematic
language herself, terms like Mahometan strain or Turkish bashaws as
metaphors for male domination. It shows how by the end
(10:29):
of the century, these newer empire metaphors drawn from contemporary
conflicts and stereotypes, were starting to emerge and maybe crowd
out the older Roman ones.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Okay, empires within conquest control. This seems to lead us
naturally to another powerful image. You mentioned the mind in chains.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yes, exactly. Metaphors of fetters, chains, clogs, irons, even grizzlier
instruments of torture were surprisingly common. They were widely used
to describe mental bondage. And this imagery well, it strikingly
mirrored the very real historic context slavery and the burgeoning
abolitionist movement happening at the same time.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
So the medicurs weren't just abstract.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Not entirely. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, for instance, defined to chain
simply as to bring into slavery, and Johnson himself describing
the incredibly hard work of writing a dictionary called the
writer of dictionaries the slave of science a kind of
intellectual bondage. This imagery drew from both internal and external
forms of bondage. You know. Gerard Winstanley, a radical social
(11:28):
reformer from an earlier period but still influential, argued that
the inward bondages of the mind are all occasioned by
the outward bondage of society. And in literature you have
poems like Ander Marvel's Dialogue between the Soul and Body,
where the soul feels enslaved in the physical chains of
nerves and arteries and veins. And remember, this period saw
(11:48):
the rapid expansion of the Royal African Company, which literally
branded in slaved Africans with the initials of its patron.
That gives a really grim literal context to these metaphors
of mental chains. Philosophical you get some surprising twists. David
Hume famously declared reason is and not only to be
the slave of the passions.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Wait, reason is the slave, not the master exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
This was a huge revaluation, prioritizing sentiment feeling over strict
cold rationality. Reason's role was to serve the passions, not
rule them. But fetters weren't always grim. They could also
be softer, like soft, amorous entanglements. The poet Alexander Pope
spoke of mighty hearts held in slender chains and the
(12:30):
chain of love and Phyllis Wheatley, a truly groundbreaking African
American poet of the era. She strikingly described reverie daydreaming
as a kind of soft captivity. She wrote about silken
fetters binding the mind, while paradoxically the unbounded soul is
actually set free.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
That's fascinating, chains that liberate.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
It's a beautiful paradox, isn't it. It shows how these
metaphors of confinement could simultaneously evoke liberation or connection.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Okay, let's shift gear slightly. We talked about impressions being
stamped on the mind like wax impact that a bit more,
how do they see thoughts actually forming right?
Speaker 2 (13:03):
The mind as a surface receiving impressions. This metaphor picturing
the mind as a wax tablet or tabula rasa blank
slate receiving a stamp or impression was absolutely central to
eighteenth century empiricism, especially to the philosophy of John Locke.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
The blank slate idea exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Locke famously explained how simple ideas come from sensation using
this metaphor of wax. He said the wax could be
overhardened with cold, making it hard to impress or maybe
it was too soft, or perhaps the seal the experience
wasn't applied with a sufficient force, resulting in just an
obscure print, a phizzy idea. He used this specifically to
argue against the idea of innate principles, you know, ideas
(13:44):
supposedly stamped upon the mind of man from birth. No,
he insisted all ideas come from experience, and the word
stamp itself was incredibly versatile back then. Johnson's dictionary list's
meanings from like a foot stomping to a mark, a picture,
official authority, currency, intrinsic.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Value, so it could mean many things at once.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Precisely, this multiplicity allowed it to adapt to all sorts
of different theories of the self. You could have heart
stamped like coinage, or souls bearing divine seals, and this
transport of impressions from the physical body to the immaterial
mind was crucial. How did that happen? The book highlights
again how linguistic dualism reinforced mind body dualism. Here they
(14:23):
used metaphor to try and bridge that gap between matter
and mind, even if the actual how the mechanism remained
unspecified or deferred.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
So the metaphor stood in for a scientific explanation they
didn't have.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Yet you could say that it did the conceptual work,
even if the physics wasn't understood.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Okay, So from wax to metal you mentioned the mind
being forged or refined.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
Absolutely, that's another key cluster of metaphors. The soul could
be tempered or forged like steel, thoughts and passions could
be refined like separating precious metal from ore, and the
heart could be steeled, melted, or coined. Your character, your temperament,
the very stuff you were made of was your metal,
right but clearly related to m etal And just like
(15:05):
a precious metal, your metal could be tested put through
fire to see its quality. Alexander Pope, in his essay
on Man, used the idea of mercury being mixed into
human nature. He suggested the draws, cements, what else were
too refined, implying that maybe even impurities flaws contributes something
essential to human nature and devotional literature. Religious writing often
(15:27):
depicted death as the ultimate refiner, the process that finally
separates the soul's precious metal from the drossy body. It's
also interesting how this played out in terms of social class.
Samuel Boden, a poet, explicitly figured the laboring class mind
as a mind. He wrote about how bright genius sparkles
through a humble mind despite poverty, containing useful minerals like lead,
(15:48):
maybe not gold, but still valuable.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Interesting and base metals right.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
Brass and bronze often signified negative qualities like impudence or
lack of real value. Sir Robert Walpole, a very powerful statesman,
was even nick named Sir Robert Brath by his opponents. Yeah,
and the source notes importantly that travel literature sometimes quite
problematically applied darker base metals to describe the faces of
foreign people's Indians, Turks, Native Americans, although there was this
(16:15):
paradox where a character could still be described as having
the fairest mind in a dark colored case. So it
wasn't always straightforwardly racist, but the potential was definitely there.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Okay, let's move to another one. The mind is a
mirror that seems pretty intuitive reflecting the world.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
It does seem interative, doesn't it, And the mirror metaphor
was indeed pervasive. It described the mind's ability to reflect nature,
to receive those impressions we talked about, and even to
contemplate its own self image. Now, some literary historians like MH.
Abrams argued there was a big shift from an Enlightenment
mirror where the mind passively reflects external reality, to a
(16:51):
Romantic lamp, where the mind actively projects its own light,
its own creativity.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Right, mirror versus lamp.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Yeah, it's a famous distinction, But this Bok's research actually
challenges that simple picture. It nites that mirror metaphors didn't
disappear with Romanticism. They actually increased as the eighteenth century closed.
And even a key Romantic poet like William Wordsworth himself
claimed that the mind of man as natural the mirror
of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature. So
(17:18):
not a lamp, but a mirror. And these weren't just
passive mirrors in their conception either. Think about actual mirrors
in eighteenth century homes. They were often installed strategically to
illuminate the room, reflecting sunlight from outside and multiplying the
light from candles inside. They did something, ah.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
So they weren't just passive reflectors exactly.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
And John Locke back to him, described the understanding as
an eye and the mind as a mirror. He said
the mind can no more refuse to have nor alter
when ideas are imprinted than amer can refuse, alter, or
obliterate the images or ideas which the objects set before
it do therein produce. That passage is really central to
(17:57):
the idea of the mind's passive reception of impression. But
what's fascinating is the ambiguity that creeps in the way
it's phrased. Sometimes the mirror itself could almost be construed
as a mind, and as the source points out, the
metaphor constantly figures depth and erases boundaries, tricking us out
of ourselves. Is the mirror inside us or outside? Is
it the poem reflecting the world or the poet's mind
(18:18):
reflecting itself? It gets complicated.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Okay, So if the mind is reflecting the world or
maybe itself, where does it actually live? You mentioned it
was pictured as a room often.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Yes, the eighteenth century frequently envisioned the mind or parts
of it as an inmost room, maybe a closet or study,
a private space for secret thoughts, for withdrawal, meditation, maybe writing.
Renee de Karte, the philosopher, famously developed his whole epistemology
while secluded in a small stove, heated room, a pole.
(18:48):
He was seeking a mind quite free from prejudices, this
kind of ultimate fantasy of.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Withdrawal, locking himself away to think clearly, precisely.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
And even Daniel Dafoe's Robinson Crusoe, stranded on his Eye Island,
reflected that he found much more solitude in the middle
of the greatest collection of mankind in the world, back
in London than on his supposedly desolate island. Solitude was internal.
This imagery even extended sometimes to the anatomy of the mine,
or what they thought was the anatomy. Joseph Addison, in
(19:17):
his Spectator Essays wrote the satirical piece where he dissected
a bow's head a fashionable young man. He finds the
pineal gland, which discartes thought was the seed of the soul,
and reports that it smells of essence and orange flower
water and was encompassed with mirrors.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Mirrors inside the head.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Yeah, reflecting a soul basically contemplating its own beauties. It
portrays the soul as partitioned, having its own private, maybe narcissistic,
little apartment in the brain, and often these inmost rooms
of the mind were described in quite grand terms, royal
or aristocratic terms like a presence chamber where sovereign mind
sits and presides over all the sensory information coming in.
(19:54):
But you know, private spaces could quickly become public, like
in Fielding's Tom Jones Mollie's wicked rug in her ends
up betraying her secret thoughts and actions. The private becomes evidence,
and the mind could also be seen as a treasure
house that needed to be locked shut. Alexander Pope wrote
of one jingling padlock on the mind. There's even a
humorous poem by Matthew Pryor and English Padlock about a
(20:16):
jealous husband trying desperately to lock his wife's mind, but
he learns she can just prick her mind like pricking
a message onto paper and correspond through the keyhole. Anyway,
you can't really lock up thoughts exactly. This dizzying back
and forth between literal locks and figurative mental locks. It
underscores how metaphors of confinement are doubled in the dualisms
(20:37):
of the eighteenth century body and mind, public and private, locked.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
And unlocked, okay, which brings us finally to writing itself.
How did the very act of writing shape the image
of the mind.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
This is a huge one. The eighteenth century frequently used
writing metaphors, most famously the tabula rasa or blank slate.
That concept we associate strongly with lock, but actually it
was much more broadly used. It wasn't just and empiricist thing.
All sorts of thinkers used it.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
The mind as empty paper waiting to be written on.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Pretty much. The basic idea was that experience inscribes a
blank slate, memory becomes a written record, and the heart
or the soul could be engraved with tenets of belief,
like commandments etched in stone. And then Samuel Richardson's novels,
especially Carissa, which was enormously popular, had a profound effect.
They really shaped the increase of writing metaphors in the
(21:25):
mid eighteenth century around the seventeen fifties and sixties, his
technique epistolary writing telling the story through letters, conflated thought
itself with the act of letter writing. Characters like Clarissa
could write to the moment with their thoughts, keeping pace
with her pen, so reading.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
The letters felt like reading their minds in real time exactly.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
It created this incredible immediacy immersing the reader directly into
the character's mental process. It felt like you were right
there inside her head as things were happening, and Richardson
used it deliberately. Clarissa's delicate and even mind is seen
in the very cut of her letters, the style the
handwriting implied, and crucially, after her traumatic rape, her disordered
(22:05):
mind is pictured as a disordered page, fragmented, maybe blotted.
This powerfully reinforced the idea of the self as a
kind of text, legible or perhaps illegible to those who
knew how to read it. Signs and the chapter concludes
with this truly profound, almost visceral detail. Much of the
ink us in the eighteenth century was made from galls,
which are actually tumor like growths and oak trees caused
(22:25):
by wasps mixed with ferrous sulfate iron salts.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Ink made from tree tumors.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
Yeah, iron gall ink. It's very dark, very permanent. So
when Chlorissa, in her despair, dips her pen and ink
in gall and writes, it becomes this incredibly potent image.
It's an indelible picture. The sources a physical act using
this bitter substance that almost literally challenges our ability to discriminate,
figurative and literal. Is the gall just ink or is
(22:51):
it her bitterness and suffering made manifest on the page. Wow,
it's a stunning example, really showing how literary history, when
you dig into these meticulous details, can reveal just how
deeply linguistic dualism reinforced mind body dualism throughout the entire era.
The physical ink becomes inseparable from the mental anguish.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
That's incredible. What we've really explored today is a testament,
isn't it to how language doesn't just describe reality. It
seems it actively creates it, or at least shapes our
perception of it. The eighteenth century, with its vivid animals,
precise coins, solemn quartz, vast empires, binding fetters, shaping impressions,
refining metals, reflecting mirrors, intimate rooms, and these textual writing metaphors,
(23:30):
they gave us such a dynamic picture of the mind,
all drawn from the physical world around them. It really
shows us that our very conception of the mind is,
as the book puts it, a conjuries of metaphors. Just
this collection of borrowed forms, borrowed ideas from material culture,
and the source ends by discussing something truly mind bending,
this idea of mutual metaphor.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Ah. Yeah, that's where the lines blur completely.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Right, where the distinction between the literal thing being described
a tenor and the figurative thing it's compared to the vehicle,
it just collapses. They become like on equal footing. It
uses John Denham's poem Cooper's Hill as an example, talking
about a river, and the river in the palm is
both a literal hydrological description, it's just a river and
(24:14):
it's a stream of ideas. At that point the book says,
it's no longer really important which is the vehicle and
which is the tenor. They've merged. So this leaves us
with a fascinating final thought for you the listener, to
maybe chew on if the way we think about the
mind even now it's so deeply intertwined with these historical metaphors,
What new uses for old ones are we perhaps unconsciously
(24:35):
still making today, And maybe even more intriguingly, what entirely
new metaphors drawn from our world, technology, neuroscience, whatever, are
shaping our understanding of the mind in the twenty first century. Well,
thank you for joining us on this deep dive into
the mind's metaphors. We hope it's given you a useful
shortcut being well informed, and maybe plenty of surprising fats
that think about
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