Abstract
In his article, and the Metaphysical Conceit,1 Mr. George Watson puts forward the view that the metaphysical conceit was killed by a change in critical theory-a change which he illustrates from the writings of Hobbes. According to Mr. Watson, Hobbes in his abstract of Aristotle's Rhetoric expressed himself in favor of the metaphysical conceit, but that in time he carried further a process which had begun with Ramism, and by proceeding to attack the last province of poetry still unreformed by logic, came to dismiss the metaphysical conceit as being mere sound. Mr. Watson appears to me to have misinterpreted the evidence. When Hobbes adds to Aristotle's remarks on the metaphor, And the more unlike, and unproportionable the things be otherwise, the more grace hath the Metaphor, 2 he comments This last remark, an advocacy of literary unproportion, puts Hobbes well and truly in the metaphysical camp. And to show us Hobbes actually in the process of killing the metaphysical conceit, he quotes from Leviathan:
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