Analogy in intellectual research is analogous to a well-trained hunting dog in hunting ducks, and if it were recognized and used as a tool in education and general research, not merely unconsciously, as it is used now, but intentionally, it would be a giant leap forward for intellectual invention.
Brushing all scholarly obscurity aside, analogy is simply a likeness between two entities that are otherwise unlike. Students in the last two years of high school should be trained in the creation of analogies. They should be given assignments such as, “Make two analogies to be handed in tomorrow.” This would get them thinking analogically, and analogies would open new areas for intellectual exploration.
Analogies don”t generally prove anything (their usual employment), for they can, and generally do, connect two or more entities incomparably unlike, as in the first two lines of this letter; but their most useful use is not to prove something, rather to start new lines of thought. For example, Charles Darwin found the concept of natural selection y pursuing an analogy implanted by the statement of Thomas Robert Malthus, English economist, that people commonly get too numerous to find sufficient food in their environment.
Further, to make the best of a bad situation, as it says in the song, thinkers can make disagreement in discussion, instead of clogging promotional progress, point to areas where new analogies may lie hidden, every discovered analogy being analogous to a handy protuberance in a cliff-side discovered by a mountain climber.
Heck, there”s no end to the thing.
Dean Sparks, Lucerne
