“The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.”

—  José Ortega Y Gasset

"Taboo and Metaphor"
The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)
Context: The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our other faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or to break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. A strange thing, indeed, the existence in man of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another — from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second.

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José Ortega Y Gasset photo
José Ortega Y Gasset 85
Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist 1883–1955

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