3. METAPHOR, IMAGE, SIMILE
The third sphere of content attached to the riddle and the allegory consists in the imaged thing generally. The riddle veiled the still independently cognized significance and the mode of its shaping in cognate, albeit heterogeneous and distantly placed traits of definition was still of most importance. Allegory on the contrary emphasized the perspicuity of the significance so strongly as the predominant aim, that the personification and its attributes appear deposed to the rank of mere signs. The imaged thing now connects this clarity of allegorical expression with that impulse of the riddle to envisage the significance which stands out clearly before the mind in the form of an externality cognate with it; the result, however, is not that it gives rise to problems which have first of all to be solved, but rather that the imaged shape appears, by means of which the preconceived conception is revealed with absolute transparency, notifying itself as that which it really is.
(a) The Metaphor
The first point we have to draw attention to in the metaphor is this, that it may be accepted at once as essentially a simile, in so far as it expresses clear and self-subsistent significance in a similar phenomenon of reality comparable with it. In the comparison as such, however, both sides of the comparison, that is the real meaning and the image, are definitely kept apart from each other, while on the contrary in the metaphor this separation, albeit it is essentially present, is not as yet clearly posited. For this reason Aristotle long ago distinguished comparison and metaphor by his statement that a "how" is added to the former which is absent from the latter. In other words the metaphorical expression specifies but one aspect, the image. In the context, however, to which the image is attached, the real significance which is intended lies so near that it is at the same time immediately asserted without any direct separation of it from the image. When it is said, for example: "the Spring-time of these cheeks," or "a sea of tears," we are inevitably forced to accept such an expression as an image rather than an actual fact, an image whose significance the context at the same time expressly designates. In the symbol and allegory the relation of actual meaning to external form is not asserted either so immediately or necessarily. From the fact that an Egyptian staircase consists of nine stages, and a hundred other circumstances of similar pregnancy, it is only the adept, the connoisseur, and the professor who will derive a symbolical significance, and doubtless will scent out and discover much that is both mystical and symbolical into the bargain, which is so much ingenuity of research thrown away for the reason that what is discovered is not there. This may have happened often enough to my honoured friend Creutzer, no less than our latter-day Platonists and the commentators of Dante.
(a) In range and variety of form it is impossible to exhaust the resources of metaphor; its definition, however, is simple. It is a wholly abbreviated comparison, in which we find, as a fact, image and significance are not as yet set in opposition to one another, but only the image is introduced by it; at the same time, however, the meaning which is thus attached to the image is not its real meaning; this is as it were effaced, and by virtue of the content in which it is set we are enabled to recognize the significance which is really intended in the image itself, albeit that meaning is not expressly asserted.
For the reason, however, that the meaning that is thus rendered intelligible under the image only comes to light by virtue of the context, the significance which is expressed in metaphor cannot claim the importance of an independent artistic presentation; their mode of appearance is purely incidental, so that metaphors, in a still more emphatic degree, can only be employed as the external embellishment of an essentially independent work of art.
(β) The metaphor is mainly used in the expressions of speech, which we may usefully consider in this relation under the following aspects.
(αα) In the first place every language includes within its own compass a host of metaphors. They arise from the fact that a word, which in the first instance merely designates something entirely sensuous, is carried over into a spiritual sphere. "Grasp", "comprehend"[92], and generally a number of words connected with the processes of thought, have in regard to their original meaning a content that is wholly sensuous, which is consequently abandoned and exchanged for the meaning applicable to mind; the first meaning is sensuous, the second spiritual.
(ββ) By degrees, however, the metaphorical aspect disappears in the general use of such a word, which as the current coin of language is converted from an expression which is not strictly accurate to one that is so, the effect of this process being that image and import, owing to the habitual frequency with which the latter is only conceived in the former, cease to differ from one another, and the image merely immediately presents the abstract significance itself instead of a concrete mode of vision[93].
When we take, for example, the word "grasp" in the sense applicable to mental life it entirely escapes us that there is any sensuous relation implied between the hand and external objects[94]. In living languages this distinction between genuine metaphor and words which already through usage have fallen to the level of a mere means of expression is readily established; the reverse is the case with dead languages, for the reason that here mere etymology is unable finally to bring our minds to a decision, inasmuch and in so far as the question does not depend on the original source of that word, and its general development in speech, but first and foremost on the fact whether a word which has all the appearance of being used in a picturesque and metaphorical sense had or had not already lost by habitual usage under a meaning applying exclusively to spirit, and in the speech when alive, its first sensuous significance and been absorbed wholly in that higher sense.