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The view of metaphor as the definition of mental operations in ‘sensible’ terms, held as we have seen by almost all the major thinkers of the eighteenth century, may be traced back to Locke. Locke had remarked on the ‘great … dependence our Words have on common sensible Ideas’, and in keeping with his empiricist epistemology, had outlined the process of metaphor as follows:
(Words), which are made use of to stand for Actions and Notions quite removed from sense, have their rise from thence, and from obvious sensible Ideas are transferred to more abstruse significations, and made to stand for Ideas that come not under the cognisance of our Senses; … And I doubt not, but if we could trace them to their sources, we should find, in all Languages, the names which stand for Things that fall not under our Senses, to have had their first rise from sensible Ideas.
Deeply ingrained in Locke's analysis is the familiar idea of the primacy of sense experience, and its centrality in understanding and expressing the notions of the mind. The concept of metaphor as excluding ‘comparison’ and emphasising ‘representation’ and ‘description’ that ‘force the image of the thing described upon the mind’,1 is a logical derivation from Locke; and such is the view of metaphor assigned to Johnson.
Johnson's illustration of the metaphorical ‘process’, however, despite its apparent conformity to Lockean progression from the outer to the inner, establishes a correlation between the mental and the sensible. It unfolds the essential nature of language as a definition of reality in terms of the human consciousness, and thus makes metaphor central to language itself.
Johnson carefully chose the word ‘arrive’ to illustrate the course of metaphor in the full complexity of the mind ultimately realising itself in itself. Explicit in Johnson's example is the