ABSTRACT
Of all metaphors in Western thought on mankind and culture, the oldest, most powerful and encompassing is the metaphor of growth. Metaphor is a way of knowing—one of the oldest, most deeply embedded, even indispensable ways of knowing in the history of human consciousness. Closely related to the metaphor of growth, supporting it indeed, is an analogy: the analogy of cultural and social change to the growth manifested in the organism. This analogy can be seen as part of that wider one in which society as a whole, its structure and processes, is declared to be organismic. It can hardly be claimed that the analogy holds the same direct relation to contemporary, even eighteenth and nineteenth century, thought that it held to Greek and Roman. Between the Christian theory of sacred development and the Greek metaphor of growth, albeit a modified metaphor, there is close and profound relation.
