Colin Murray Turbayne

The mechanical philosophy is a case of being victimized by metaphor. I choose Descartes and Newton as excellent examples of metaphysicians of mechanism malgré eux, that is to say, as unconscious victims of the metaphor of the great machine. Together they have founded a church, more powerful than that founded by Peter and Paul, whose dogmas are now so entrenched that anyone who tries to reallocate the facts is guilty of more than heresy.

Knowing the theory of anything is contrasted with know-how in all the arts...Beethoven..Michelangelo..Shakespeare, all great exponents of know-how, probably knew how to manipulate their instruments to achieve the desired results long before they knew the theory of their art. Perhaps some of them never bothered to learn the theory. On the other hand, there are many who know the theory better than these, but who lack know-how....Although we acquire the skill of understanding words by experience, so that we know the correlations between them and things, between words and other words, and between words and feelings and actions, we do not do it by inductive reasoning. Nor must we think that we do it by deductive reasoning... In the main, words are cues rather than clues.

Thus to the plain man there may be no metaphor in Aristotle's "substance", Descartes' "machine of nature," Newtonian "force" and "attraction," Thomas Young's "kinetic energy" and Michelangelo's figure of Leda. Placed in their customary contexts these present nothing to him but the face of literal truth. To the initiated, however, who are aware of the "gross original" senses as well as the now literal senses , they may become metaphors. There are no metaphors per se....

(Berkeley) gave the impression that he too was a victim, that he took the assertion "Mind is a substance" in a literal sense, that he thought that the soul was actually a "substance" "in" which ideas "inhere" and which "supports" the ideas, ect. hence the expression "in the mind".... Berkeley had a purely substantivalist conception of the mind, confirmed by his private utterances.

However appropriate in one sense a good metaphor may be, in another sense there is something inappropriate about it. This inappropriateness results from the use of a sign in a sense different from the usual...

There is a remedy against the domination imposed, not by generals, statesmen, and men of action, whose power dissolves when they retire, but by the great sort-crossers, whose power increases when they die- the remedy of becoming aware of metaphor...

In short, the use of metaphor involves both the awareness of duality of sense and the pretense that the two different senses are one.

The metaphysics that still dominates science and enthralls the minds of men is nothing but a metaphor, and a limited one.

It is a confusion to present the items of one sort in the idioms of another -- without awareness. For to do this is not just to cross two different sorts; it is to confuse them. It is to mistake, for example, the theory for the fact, the procedure for the process, the myth for history, the model for the thing and the metaphor for the face of literal truth.