All thinking is analogising, and \u2018tis the use of life to learn
metonymy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

In an influential essay entitled \u201cAnalogy versus Identity,\u201d included in a book he edited with the title Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance,1Brian Vickers has argued that what distinguishes the Renaissance occult tradition from the emergent scientific tradition was their respective attitudes toward the relation between words and things,verba andres; and more generally signs and their referents. The mistake of the occult tradition (the Renaissance Neoplatonism of Ficino and Pino) consisted in imputing a direct, even causal, relationship between the word and its referent (what Ogden and Richards called the \u201cdenotative fallacy\u201d; Cassirer, \u201cthe hypostatization of the word\u201d; or in the terminology of Saussure, the confusing of the signifier with the signified). The corrective to this linguistic confusion was the notion that the linguistic sign is conventional and arbitrary.2 (Apparently the debate about words and things began with Plato\u2019s

favor of the separation between language and reality.) Vickers argues that the new philosophers and scientists, like Galileo, Bacon, and Hobbes, argued for the conventional or arbitrary relation between language and reality.3

The main thrust of Vickers\u2019s exposition is that the Renaissance Neoplatonist mystical and magical tradition believed in \u201cnatural language,\u201d that is, an \u201cinnate union of signifier and signified,\u201d and the new scientists and experimentalists held that \u201cthe linguistic sign is conventional, its meaning given by society.\u201d Magical, astrological, and alchemical thought and practices were predicated on this root fallacy of natural language.

In sum the Vickers narrative is as follow: In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were to incompatible views of the relationship between language and reality. \u201cIn the scientific tradition, a clear distinction is made between words and things and between literal and metaphorical language. The occult does not recognize this distinction: words are treated as if they were equivalent to things and can be substituted for them. Manipulate the one and you manipulate the other\u201d(p. 95). Thus in the occult tradition \u201canalogical\u201d relations4 are transformed into \u201cidentity\u201d relations; a conventional relation between word and thing is made into a direct or causal or natural relation.

notions of things\u201d (in Advancement of Learning); Hobbes as asserting that \u201cNames are signs not of things, but of our cogitations\u201d (inLeviathan); and Locke\u2019s \u201cEssay Concerning Human Understanding\u201d (1690) as including a refutation of natural language theories and recalling Hobbes, Bacon, and the long tradition back to Aristotle and Plato.

following features: a similarity of rates or proportions; resemblance in particulars between things otherwise unlike; agreement or resemblance in certain aspects as in form or function; similarity without identity. A more informative discussion of analogy and its use in two senses\u23af the \u201cscientific predictive\u201d and the \u201cconventional persuasive\u201d\u23af is to be found in my essay, \u201cForm and Meaning of Magical Acts,\u201d in Stanley J. Tambiah, Culture, Thought and

momentous change of epistem in regard to how language relates to reality. Foucault attributes to the Port-Royal school of the seventeenth century the new conception of \u201crepresentation\u201d that replaced the sixteenth-century Renaissance notion of \u201csimilitude\u201d or \u201cresemblance\u201d between sign and object. The new theory of the linguistic sign, framed as a binary opposition, held that the sign as a thing representing wasother than the thing represented.6 This is the semiological notion that came to maturity later with Saussure that the relation between signifier and signified is primarily arbitrary and conventional. In Foucault\u2019s exposition the fundamental configuration or episteme of sixteenth-century knowledge consisted of \u201cthe reciprocal cross-reference of signs and similitudes.\u201d The practices or operations based on this way of knowing based on relations of \u201cresemblance,\u201d was what was labeled \u201cmagic.\u201d In Foucault\u2019s view too the sixteenth-century view that produced the operations of \u201cmagic\u201d is replaced by the seventeenth-century episteme associated with Cartesian rationalism, mechanistic philosophy, and positivist science. In the new analogical view, language is an analysis and a linear ordering of thought according to the rules of general grammar, and proposition is to language what representation is to thought.

1. Vickers tends to present the Renaissance discourse as a divergent debate between two sets of antagonists: the scientists and protoexperimentalists on the one side and the Neoplatonist practitioners of the occult arts on the other side. But Frances Yates and her associates have submitted that, viewed in terms of the context of that time (a historicist view), there was a co-presence among the practitioners of magical, mystical, mathematical, and instrumental views and operations, such that a sorting of them into separate and exclusive \u201cscientific\u201d and \u201coccult\u201d groupings is unrealistic. The unambiguous separation is really a retrospective narrative of the alleged linear march of science. Similarly, Charles Webster has persuasively argued that much of the history of science literature developed in the present century has exaggerated \u201cthe extent of the epistemological shift occurring between the Ages of Paracelsus and Newton\u201d and that there were \u201cremarkable elements of continuity sufficient