Paradigms for a Metaphorology

5. Terra Incognita and ‘Incomplete Universe’ as Metaphors of the Modern Relationship to the World

V Terra Incognita and ‘Incomplete Universe’ as Metaphors of the Modern Relationship to the World I would like now to provide further evidence of the pragmatic function of absolute metaphors in relation to two very specific examples, the terra incognita metaphor and the metaphorics of the ‘incomplete universe’. It is characteristic of both that they originate in quite specific historical ‘experiences’: the first gives a metaphorical gloss to the age of discovery’s conclusion that the ‘known world’, which for millennia was relatively constant and appeared to have certain zones of unfamiliarity only at its edges, proves in retrospect to have taken up only a small corner of the earth’s surface; the other views the universe as analogous to a workpiece and draws from the newly emerging idea of evolutionary cosmogony the metaphorical conclusion that man is faced with the ‘task’ of bringing the workpiece to completion. ‘Evolution’ is transformed via the metaphor into a transitive idea: everything that nature has already effected becomes the framework for future human achievement. The ‘America’ metaphor enjoys widespread popularity in the seventeenth century . In the foreword to his “Pseudodoxia,” Thomas Browne speaks of the “America and untravelled parts of Truth,” the new world of a truth that has expanded Terra Incognita and ‘Incomplete Universe’ as Metaphors 53 beyond all expectation. Joseph Glanvill gives a similar account in “The Vanity of Dogmatizing” (1661): “And that there is an America of secrets, and unknown Peru of Nature, whose discovery would richly advance them, is more than conjecture.” Abraham Cowley, whose epic “Davideis” (1656) grafts a Newtonian history of creation on a foundation that remains firmly Ptolemaic, apostrophizes Thomas Hobbes in a poem: The Baltick, Euxine, and the Caspian, And slender-limbed Mediterranean, Seem narrow creeks to thee, and onely fit, For the poor wretched fisher-boats of wit. Thy nobler vessel the vast ocean tries, And nothing sees but seas and skies, Till unknown regions it descries; Thou great Columbus of the golden lands of new philosophies, Thy task was harder much than his, For thy learned America is Not onely found out first by thee, And rudely left to future industrie; But thy eloquence and thy wit Has planted, peopled, built, and civiliz’d it.1 The feeling or intimation that the most important landmasses of truth have yet to be discovered, or have only been dimly perceived in their outlines, gives rise to an attentio animi [attentiveness of the soul], conditioning the mind to see, in each new finding, only the headlands and outlying islands of unexplored continents. It is again Thomas Browne who integrates the discovery of the terra incognita of human interiority into this metaphorics: “I could never content my contemplation with those generall pieces of wonders, the flux and reflux of the sea, the encrease of Nile, the conversion of the Needle to the North, and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of Nature, which without travell I can doe in the Cosmography of my selfe; we carry with us the wonders we seeke without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us . . .”2 Montesquieu , who complains in his previously cited 1717 address to the Academy of Bordeaux that nature’s stock of mysteries appears to be nearing exhaustion, compares this process with the discovery of a ‘new world’ in the age that had just drawn to a close. The discoverers had taken their pick of the accumulated spoils, leaving only 1. Thomas Hobbes, Opera philosophica quae latine scripsit omnia, ed. Molesworth, vol. 1 (London, 1839), V. I thank G. Gawlick for this reference. 2. [Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643), in The Major Works (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 78.] 54 Paradigms for a Metaphorology savages and wildernesses for those who came after them. But this image is merely the somber rhetorical foil for the words of encouragement that follow: “Nonetheless , messieurs, let us not lose heart: what do we know of what lies in store for us? Perhaps there are a thousand secrets still awaiting discovery: when the geographers have reached the end of their learning, they put vast seas and wild climes in their maps; but perhaps there are even more riches in these seas and in these climes than we currently possess.”3 In the aesthetic realm, we find a parallel to this metaphorical opening of the horizon of expectations in Lessing’s discussion of a...