A Study of Analogy

THIRTY years ago I contributed to a New York magazine an essay upon analogy. It is a little curious that, so much later in life, my mind should again turn to that subject. Looking over what I then wrote, I find but little in which I can now rest. This paragraph is a favorable specimen of the essay I then wrote : " There is another sight than that of the eye, there is another sunshine than that of the regal day, there is another world than the one we see and feel. There is a love of the spirit as well as of the passions, a pleasure in the intellect as well as in the senses; so there is a higher temperance than concerns this body, a higher digestion and assimilation than goes on here. We are related to the winds and tides,to the morning star and to the solar year, and the same craft runs through all. ”

This is rather a high flight, but it is true that we make the outward or objective world the symbol of the inward or subjective world. I am not going to maintain that the latter is the reality, and the former only the shadow. Things are before ideas with us. Things indeed afford the moulds in which our ideas are cast. Hence all language is more or less symbolical or metaphorical.

Our daily conversation is full of pictures and parables, or the emblematic use of things. From life looked at as a voyage we get the symbolic use of anchor, compass, pole-star, helm, haven ; from life considered as a battle we read deep meanings in shield, armor, fencing, captain. the citadel, panic, onset. Life regarded under the figure of husbandry gives us the expressive symbols of seedtime and harvest, planting and watering, tares and brambles, pruning and training, the chaff and the wheat. We talk in parables when we little suspect it. What various applications we make of such words as dregs, gutter, eclipse, satellite, hunger, thirst, kindle, brazen, echo, and hundreds of others! We speak of the reins of government, the sinews of war, the seeds of rebellion, the morning of youth, the evening of age, a flood of emotion, the torch of truth, burning with resentment, the veil of secrecy, the foundations of character, the root of the matter. We say, his spirits drooped, his mind soared, his heart softened, his brow darkened, his reputation was stabbed, he clinched his argument. We say, his course was beset with pitfalls, his efforts were crowned with success, his eloquence was a torrent that carried all before it, and so on.

Burke calls attention to the metaphors that are taken from the sense of taste, as a sour temper, bitter curses, bitter fate; and, on the other hand, a sweet person, a sweet experience, and the like. Other epithets are derived from the sense of touch, as a soft answer, a polished character, a cold reception, a sharp retort, a hard problem ; or from the sense of sight, implying light, darkness, and color. All trades, pursuits, occupations, furnish types or symbols for the mind. The word “whitewash” has become a very useful one. Thoreau said he would not be as one who drives a nail into mere lath and plaster. Even the railroad has contributed useful terms, as side-tracked, down brakes, the red flag, etc. Great men are like the through train that connects far-distant points ; others are merely local. From the builder we get the effective phrase and idea of scaffolding. So much in the world is mere scaffolding. So much in society is mere varnish and veneer. Life is said to have its “ seamy side.” The lever and the fulcrum have their supersensuous uses. The chemist with his solvents, precipitations, crystallizations, attractions and repulsions, and the natural philosopher with his statics and dynamics and his correlation of forces, have enlarged our powers of expression. The strata of the geologist furnish a useful type. What a significant symbol is afforded by the wave ! There is much in life, in history, and in all nature that is typified by it. We have cold waves and hot waves, and in the spring and fall migrations of the birds we have “bird waves.” Earthquake shocks go in waves and circles ; how often our views and conceptions of things are expressed by the circle ! It is a symbol of most profound meaning. It helps us to understand how the universe is finally inexplicable; that there is neither beginning nor end, and that it retreats forever into itself.

The author of John Inglesant draws this apt illustration from a common game. “ Life,” he says, “ is like a game of cards ; you cannot control the cards, but of such as turn up you must make the most.” Or this, still more apt: “ The election of a new pope is like a change of trumps at a game of cards. All persons and matters remain the same as they were before ; yet their realms and relationships are all changed ; the aspect of the entire scene is altered.”

When Emerson heard Faraday lecture at the Royal Institute, on Diamagnetism, he was so taken with the idea that he declared dia (or cross) magnetism to be a law of the mind as well; every man had a polarity of his own.

But deeper than the symbolical character of language lies the idea of analogy, or real and valid correspondences and agreements between the world within and the world without, and between different provinces of nature. Such agreements undoubtedly exist. Yet the analogies that “ are constant and pervade nature ” are not easily enumerated. One can hardly agree with Emerson that there is “ intent” of analogy between man’s life and the seasons, because the seasons are not a universal fact of the globe, and man’s life is. The four seasons are well defined in New England, but not in Ecuador. St. Paul’s inference from the seed, that is “ not quickened except it die,” will not bear close scrutiny, because the seed, if it germinates, does not die ; it is absorbed and transformed into the plant as the egg into the chick. If it dies, it rots and never comes up. 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. 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 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 they are not like this; we know 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 ?

Analogy is at best only a staff or an instrument in the hand ; it does not clap wings to our shoulders that will carry us to distant spheres. All arguments for a future life based upon analogy, or upon the laws and conditions of existence in this world, have one fatal defect, — they assume the existence of that which they aim to prove. Butler’s argument fails here also, as Matthew Arnold has pointed out. The analogy between the laws of this world and those of the future world where we shall be by and by may be real if that future world is real. It is not hard to believe this ; what it is hard to believe, or what we want evidence of, is that this future world exists, and of this analogy cannot furnish a shadow of proof. Out of this whirling, seething, bubbling universe of warring and clashing forces man has emerged. How impossible it all seems to reason ! Experience alone tells us it is true. Upon the past history of the earth and of the race of man we may predict astonishing changes and transformations for the future of both, because the continuity of cause and effect is not broken, but the perpetuity of the me and the you is not implied. All that is implied is the perpetuity of the sum of physical forces. But as to the future of the individual, of me and you, what can we predicate upon the past or upon the present ? Only this : that as we had a beginning we shall have an ending ; that as yesterday we were not, so to-morrow we shall not be. A man is like the electric spark that glows and crackles for an instant between two dark, silent, inscrutable eternities. The fluid is not lost, but that tiny bolt has come and gone. Darkness and silence before, darkness and silence after. I do not say this is the Summing up of the whole question of immortality. I only mean to say this is where the argument from analogy lands us.

We can argue from the known to the unknown in a restricted way. We do this in life and in science perpetually. We do not know that the fixed stars have worlds revolving about them, yet the presumption, based upon our own solar system, is that they have. But could we infer other suns, were none visible, from the existence of our own ? Could we predict the future of the earth did we not know its past, or read aright its past did we not know its present state? From an arc we can complete a circle. We can read the big in the little. The motion of a top throws light upon the motion of the earth. An ingenious mind finds types everywhere, but real analogies are not so easily pointed out.

Nearly all writers and speakers give currency more or less to false or fanciful analogies: men of classical minds and training, like Matthew Arnold, to very few ; florid and vehement writers, like Ruskin, to many more. In writing or speaking, we employ metaphors and comparisons to amuse or to convince, to kindle the fancy or to influence the judgment, to light up an old truth or to enforce a new one. The poet aims to give us pleasure, and we allow him great liberties. The philosopher aims to give us truth, and we hold him to a stricter account; his figures must not tell lies. Thus when Schopenhauer says " riches are like sea water ; the more yon drink the thirstier you become,” the mind is instantly pleased by the force and aptness of the comparison, and for the moment we look upon riches as something to be avoided. But is the analogy entirely true ? Sea water is to be avoided altogether, even a single mouthful of it, but even Schopenhauer defends riches and the pursuit, of riches. “ People are often reproached for wishing for money above all things, and for loving it more than anything else; but it is natural and even inevitable for people to love that which, like an unwearied Proteus, is always ready to turn itself into whatever object their wandering wishes or manifold desires may for the moment fix upon.” Here the comparison will hear closer looking into. Wealth is indeed a Proteus that will take any form your fancy may choose. “Other things are only relatively good,” the great pessimist further says : “ money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular ; it is an abstract satisfaction of all.” What then becomes of its analogy to sea water, which so mocks and inflames our thirst ? Even the resemblance in the one particular that Schopenhauer had in mind is not true. To the great majority of people wealth brings a degree of satisfaction; they give over its pursuit, and seek the enjoyment of it. When a man embarks in the race for wealth, he is unflagging in seeking it as long as his cup of life is full; but when the limits of his powers are reached, he soon loses interest; he takes in sail, and the appetite for gold, as for other things, declines.

When the same philosopher says that to measure a man’s happiness only by what he gets, and not also by what he expects to get, is as futile as to try to express a fraction which shall have a numerator, but no denominator, he uses a figure that conveys the truth much more fully. It may be open to the objection of being too technical, but it expresses a real relation for all that. When you increase your expectations you increase your denominator; and as most men expect or want more than they have, human happiness is nearly always a fraction, — rarely is it a whole number. With many it is a very small fraction indeed. Blessed is he who expects little. The man who expects ten and realizes live is more to be envied than he who expects a thousand and realizes fifty. He is nearer the sum of his wishes. Hence the truth of the old saying that it is our wants that make us poor. When a piece of good fortune that he did not expect comes to a man, his happiness or satisfaction is no longer a fraction : it is more than a unit.

Quintilian says the early blossom of talent is rarely followed by the fruit of great achievement, but the early works of a man or youth are just as much a fruit as his later ones. There is really no analogy between the early works of an author and the blossoms of a tree. The dreams, the visions, the aspirations, of youth are more like blossoms. Probably no great man has been without them, but how they wither and fall, and how much more sober the aspect which life puts on before any solid achievements can be pointed to ! There is usually something more fresh and pristine about the earlier works of a man, — more buoyancy, more unction, more of the “ fluid and attaching character ; ” but the ripest wisdom always goes with age.

There are, no doubt, many strict and striking analogies between the mind and the body, their growth and decay, their health and disease, their assimilative, digestive, and reproductive processes. “ The mind of Otho,” says Tacitus, “ was not, like his body, soft and effeminate.” There are minds that are best described by the word masculine, and others by the word feminine. There are dull, slow, sluggish minds just as there are heavy, sluggish bodies, and the two usually go together. There are dry, lean, spare minds, and there are minds full of unction and juice. We even use the phrase “mental dyspepsia,” but the analogy here implied is probably purely fanciful, though mental dissipation, mental intemperance. are no idle words. Some people acquire the same craze for highly exciting and stimulating mental food that others have for strong drink, or for peppers and condiments. They lose their taste for simple, natural, healthful things, — for good sound literature, and crave sensational novels and the Sunday newspaper. Doubtless a large part of the reading of the American people to-day is sheer mental dissipation, and is directed by an abnormal craving for mental excitement. There is degeneration in the physical world, and there is degeneration, strictly so called, in the intellectual world. There are proportion, relation, cause and effect, health and disease, in one as in the other. Logic is but the natural relation of parts as we see them in the organic world. In fact, logic is but health and proportion. The mind cannot fly any more than the body can; it progresses from one fact or consideration to another. step by step, though often, or perhaps generally, we are not conscious of the fact. A large view or glance of truth may be suddenly revealed to it, as of the landscape from a hilltop ; but it did not fly to the vantage ground ; it reached it by a slow and may be obscure process. The world is simpler than we think. The modes and processes of things widely dissimilar are more apt to be identical than we suspect. There are homologies where we see apparent contradiction. There is but one protoplasm for animal and vegetable. A little more or less heat makes the gaseous, makes the liquid, makes the solid. The lava crystallizes or freezes at a high temperature, water at a low one, mercury at a still lower. Charcoal and the diamond are one. The same law of gravitation which makes the clouds float makes the rain fall. The law that spheres a tear spheres a globe. These facts warrant us in looking for real homologies, vital correspondences, in nature. Only such correspondences give logical and scientific value to analogy. If the likeness means identity of law, or is the same principle in another disguise, then is it an instrument of truth. We might expect many analogies between air and water, as we do, the atmosphere being but a finer ocean ; also between ice and water, and between ice and the stratified rocks. If water flows, then will ice flow ; if ice bends, then will the rocky strata bend. If cross-fertilization is good in the vegetable world, we should expect to find it good in the animal. There is thought to be a strict analogy between the succession of plants in different months of the year and the prevalence of different diseases at different seasons. The germ theory of disease gives force to the comparison. The different species of germs no doubt find some periods of the year more favorable to their development than others. If on this planet men walk about while trees are rooted to the ground, we may reasonably expect that the same is true on all other planets. If variation and the survival of the fittest are the law of one species, then they will prove to be the law of all. The bud is a kind of seed, the fruit is a kind of leaf. High culture has the same effect upon man and animals that it has upon plants, — it lessens the powers of reproduction. The lowest organisms multiply by myriads ; the higher barely keep from retrograding. A wild apple is full of seeds; in a choice pippin the seeds are largely abortive. Indeed, all weeds and parasites seem bent on filling the world with their progeny, while the higher forms fall off and tend to extinction. Snell agreements and correspondences point to identity of law. The analogy is vital.

In the animal economy there are analogies with outward nature. Thus respiration is a kind of combustion. Life itself is a kind of fire, which goes out when it has no fuel to feed on. The foliage of a tree has functions like those of the lungs of an animal. Darwin has noted the sleep of plants and their diurnal motions. Dr. Holmes has a bold fancy that trees are animals, with their tails in the air and their heads in the ground ; but there is nothing in the trunk and branches of a tree analogous to a tail, though there is a sort of rudimentary intelligence in the root, as Darwin has shown. We use the tree as a symbol of the branching of a family, — hence the family tree. But the analogy is not a true one. The branches of a family multiply and diverge when traced backward the same as forward. You had two parents, they had four, they had eight, and so on. If the human race sprang from one pair, then are its brandlings more a kind of network, an endless multiplication of meshes. All the past appears to centre in you, and all the future to spring from you. We get the family tree only by cutting out a fragment of this network.

There is little doubt that certain natural laws pervade alike both mind and matter. The law of evolution is universally operative, and is the key to development in the moral and intellectual world no less than in the physical. We are probably, in all our thoughts and purposes, much more under the dominion of universal natural laws than we suspect. The will reaches but a little way. I have no doubt that the race of man bears a definite relation to the life of the globe. — that is, to its age, its store of vitality ; that it will culminate as the vital power of the earth culminates, and decline as it declines. Like man, the earth has had its youth, — its nebulous, fiery, molten youth; then its turbulent, luxuriant, copious, riotous middle period; then its placid, temperate, ripe later age, when the higher forms emerge upon the scene. The analogy is deep and radical. The vital energy of the globe was once much more rampant and overflowing than it is now; the time will come when the pulse of the planet will be much feebler than it is now. Youth and age, then growth and decay, are universal conditions. The heavens themselves shall wax old as doth a garment. Life and death are universal conditions, and to fancy a place where death is not is to fancy one’s self entirely outside of this universe and of all possible universes.

Men in communities and assemblages are under laws that do not reach or affect the single individual, just as vast bodies of water respond to attractions and planetary perturbations that do not affect the lesser bodies. Men kindle one another as do firebrands, and beget a collective heat and enthusiasm that tyrannize over the individual purpose and will. We say things are in the air, that a spirit is abroad ; that is, that influences are at work above the wills and below the consciousness of the people. There are changes or movements in the world and in communities that seem strictly analogous to drifting ; it is as when a ship is carried out of its course by unsuspected currents, or as when arctic explorers, with their faces set northward, are unconsciously carried in the opposite direction by the ice floe beneath them. The spirit of the age, or the time-spirit, is always at work, and takes us with it, whether we know it or not. For instance, the whole religious world is now drifting away from the old theology, and drifting faster than we suspect. Certain zealots have their faces very strongly set against it, but, like Commodore Perry on the ice floe, they are going south faster than their efforts are carrying them north. Indeed, the whole sentiment of the race is moving into a more genial theological climate, although it is away from purgatorial fires rather than toward them. The political sentiment of a country also drifts. That of our own may be said to have been drifting for some time now in the direction of freer commercial intercourse with other nations.

A man’s life may stagnate as literally as water may stagnate, and just as motion and direction are the remedy for one, so purpose and activity are the remedy for the other. Movement is the condition of life, any way. Set the currents going in the air, in the water, in the body, in the mind, in the community, and a healthier condition will follow. Change, diversity, activity, are the prime conditions of life and health everywhere. People with doubts and perplexities about life go to work to ameliorate some of its conditions, and their doubts and perplexities vanish, not because the problems are solved, as they think they are, hut because their energies have found an outlet, the currents have been set going. Persons of strong will have few doubts and uncertainties. They do not solve the problems, but they break the spell of their enchantment. Nothing relieves and ventilates the mind like a resolution.

A true work of art is analogous to a living organism. “ The essential condition of art creations,” says Renan, “ is to form a living system every portion of which answers and demands every other. . . . The intimate laws of life, of the development of organic products, and of the toning down of shades must be considered at every step.” “Works like certain of Victor Hugo’s, which have no organic unity and proportion, are, according to this dictum, monstrosities. When Matthew Arnold insisted upon it that in all vital prose there is a process of evolution, he enunciated the same principle as Renan. We all know well that which is organic in books as distinguished from the inorganic, the vital as distinguished from the mechanical. Read the learned address of the president of some local scientific or literary society, and then turn to one of Professor Huxley’s trenchant papers. The difference is just that between weapons in an armory and weapons in the hands of trained soldiers. Huxley’s will and purpose, or his personality, pervade and vitalize his material and make it his own, while the learned president sustains only an accidental and mechanical relation to what he has to say. Happy is the writer who can lop off or cut out from his page everything to which he sustains only a secondary and mechanical relation. It would be easy to show, I think, that Arnold erred in denying to Emerson the meed of a great writer because of the disjointed character of Emerson’s sentences. The sentences themselves are vital. No man’s work was ever more a real and valid outcome of his mind and character than was that of Emerson. In his books we feel ourselves in contact with a person, and not merely with a faculty.

The summing up of the matter would then seem to be that there is an analogy of rhetoric and an analogy of science; a likeness that is momentary and accidental, giving rise to metaphor and parable, and a correspondence that is fundamental, arising from the universality of law.

John Burroughs.