Literary values, and other papers

by John Burroughs

The calm that comes after the storm in human life as in nature—how true the analogy. To give vent to things, how significant. To give vent to angry feelings in words, how like giving vent to smothered fire; or to any suppressed and confined force: the words come faster and hotter, the passion of anger mounts and there is a “blow out” indeed. Deny yourself the first word, and the conflagration is avoided. A passion can be smothered as literally as a fire.

The use of metaphor, comparison, analogy is twofold—to enliven and to convince; to illustrate and enforce an accepted truth, and to press home and clinch one in dispute. An apt figure will put a new face upon an old and much worn truism, and a vital analogy may reach and move the reason. Thus when Renan, referring to the decay of the old religious beliefs, says that people are no poorer for being robbed of false bank notes and bogus shares, his comparison has a logical validity,—as has also Herbert Spencer’s figure when he says, “The illusion that great men and great events came oftener in early times than now is partly due to historical perspective. As in a range of equidistant columns the farthest off look the closest, so the conspicuous objects of the past seem more thickly clustered the more remote they are.” We seem to see the identity of law in both these cases. We are treated to a pictorial argument.

We are using analogy in a legitimate and forceful way when we speak of our fund or capital of bodily health and strength, and of squandering or impairing it, or of investing it poorly.

The accidental analogies or likenesses are limitless and are the great stock in trade of most writers and speakers. They tickle the fancy and enliven the page or the discourse. But essential analogies, or those that spring from unity of law, are more rare. These have the force of logic; they shed a steady light.

St. Paul’s famous comparison of the body dead and buried with the seed in the soil, which, he says, dies before it can grow, is used with logical intent. But will it bear examination? Is the germinating seed dead in any sense that the body is dead? It is no more dead than the egg buried beneath the mother hen is dead. When the egg really dies we know the result, as we know the result when the corn rots in the ground. It is not dissolution that the seed experiences, but evolution. The illustration of the eloquent apostle may captivate the fancy, but as argument designed to convince the understanding it has no force.

There might be force in the argument for immortality drawn from the metamorphosis of the grub into the butterfly, if the chrysalis really were a shroud and held a dead body. But it is not, any more than an egg is; it is quick, and capable of movement. The analogy between it and the dead body will not hold. A much more sound analogy, based upon the chrysalis, is that which takes it as the type of a mind or soul undeveloped,—slumbering, gestating,—and the winged creature as the developed, emancipated mind.

Analogy means an agreement of relations or an equality of ratios.

When we speak of the body as a tenement and the soul as the tenant, we mean or aver that the relation of the soul to the body is the same as that of the man to the house he occupies. In either case the occupant can move out or in, and is entirely distinct from the structure that shelters him. But if we know anything about the relations of the mind and the body, we know that they are not like this; we know that they are not truthfully expressed in this comparison.

Bishop Butler’s “analogy from nature,” upon which he built his famous work, will not any better bear close examination. What analogy is there between death and sleep or a swoon? what agreement of ratios? The resemblance is entirely superficial. Or how can we predict another sphere of existence for man because another sphere awaits the unborn infant? But another sphere does not await the unborn infant; only new and different relations to the same physical sphere. An embryo implies a future; but what is there embryonic about the mature man?

This breakdown of Butler’s argument in regard to a future life was pointed out by Matthew Arnold; the very point in dispute, namely, a future life, is assumed. If there is a future life, if there is another world, it doubtless bears some analogy to this. In like manner, if there are fairies and nymphs and demigods, it is not improbable to suppose that they bear some resemblance to human beings, but shall we assume their actual existence upon such a probability?