Page:Of the conduct of the understanding (IA ofconductofunder00lock).pdf/105

Rh they are the better understood. But it is one thing to think right and another thing to know the right way to lay our thoughts before others with advantage and clearness, be they right or wrong. Well-chosen similes, metaphors, and allegories, with method and order, do this the best of anything, because being taken from objects already known and familiar to the understanding, they are conceived as fast as spoken, and the correspondence being concluded, the thing they are brought to explain and elucidate is thought to be understood too. Thus fancy passes for knowledge, and what is prettily said is mistaken for solid. I say not this to decry metaphor, or with design to take away that ornament of speech; my business here is not with rhetoricians and orators, but with philosophers and lovers of truth, to whom I would beg leave to give this one rule whereby to try whether in the application of their thoughts to anything for the improvement of their knowledge, they do in truth comprehend the matter before them really such as it is in itself. The way to discover this is to observe whether in the laying it before themselves or others, they make use only of borrowed representations and ideas foreign to the things which are applied to it by way of accommodation, as bearing some proportion or imagined likeness to the subject under consideration. Figured and metaphorical expressions do well to illustrate more abstruse and unfamiliar ideas which the mind is not yet thoroughly accustomed to, but then they must be made use of to illustrate ideas that we already have,