ABSTRACT

The value of a scientific metaphor will always in the end be determined by its effectiveness in leading to literal truths in the objective and publicly accessible world: the predictions and experiments by which one test any scientific theory and weigh its practical value. For the adoption and elaboration of suitable metaphors has a significant and central role to play in the expression, elaboration and concretisation of feeling, experience and human attitudes to the world. Religion is essentially an attempt to see the universe in personal terms, in terms of human personality. All artistic expression shares certain features of metaphorical modes of discourse, as a result of which our response to a work of art will be quite different from our response to a literal description of a state of affairs or a scientific theory. Few works of art approach the richness of the Iliad.