ABSTRACT
For twenty-five hundred years a single metaphoric conception of change has dominated Western thought. The analogy between society and the organism, more specifically between social change and the life-cycle of the organism, this metaphor very early introduced into Western European philosophy assumptions and preconceptions regarding change in society. In the seventeenth century the analogy, still popular, was again modified; this time to produce the modern idea of linear progress; the vision of mankind without old age and decline, with ever-increasing knowledge ahead. Throughout the long history of the metaphor of growth there has been the conscious distinction between growth or development on the one hand and history on the other. Functionalist premises in the study of change are precisely observed under the metaphor of growth. From the metaphor came the notion of change as a process natural to each and every living entity, social as biological, as something as much a part of its nature as structure and process.
