Page:Observations on Man 1834.djvu/218

 with different particular persons from the first, and that equally or nearly so.

In like manner, the corresponding parts of different animals, i.e. the eyes, mouth, breast, belly, legs, lungs, heart, &c. have the same names applied in a literal sense, partly from the likeness of shape, partly from that of use and application. And it is evident, that if we suppose a people so rude in language and knowledge, as to have names only for the parts of the human body, and not to have attended to the parts of the brute creatures, association would lead them to apply the same names to the parts of the brute creatures, as soon as they became acquainted with them. Now here this application would at first have the nature of a figure; but when by degrees any of these words, the eye for instance, became equally applied from the first to the eyes of men and brutes, it would cease to be a figure, and become an appellative name, as just now remarked.

But when the original application of the word is obvious, and remains distinct from the secondary one, as when we say the mouth or ear of a vessel, or the foot of a chair or table, the expression is figurative.

Hence it is plain, that the various resemblances which nature and art afford are the principal sources of figures. However, many figures are also derived from other relations, such as those of cause, effect, opposition, derivation, generality, particularity; and language itself, by its resemblances, oppositions, &c. becomes a new source of figures, distinct from the relations of things.

Most metaphors, i.e. figures taken from likeness, imply a likeness in more particulars than one, else they would not be sufficiently definite, nor affect the imagination in a due manner. If the likeness extend to many particulars, the figure becomes implicitly a simile, fable, parable, or allegory.

Many or most common figures pass so far into literal expressions by use, i.e. association, that we do not attend at all to their figurative nature. And thus by degrees figurative senses become a foundation for successive figures, in the same manner as originally literal senses.

It is evident, that if a language be narrow, and much confined to sensible things, it will have great occasion of figures: these will naturally occur in the common intercourses of life, and will in their turn, as they become literal expressions in the secondary senses, much augment and improve the language, and assist the invention. All this is manifest from the growth of modern languages, in those parts where they were heretofore particularly defective.

We come now to the consideration of analogy. Now things are said to be analogous to one another, in the strict mathematical sense of the word analogy, when the corresponding parts are all in the same ratio to each other. Thus if the several parts of the body in different persons be supposed exactly proportional to