The New Philosophy Vol 78 No 3, July-September 1975

The essential purpose of this study is to try to demonstrate the importance of analogical thought in the development of the inter-ior natural mind as a basis and nexus for later spiritual thought from correspondences. I believe that the Writings teach that analogical thought is vital to the development of the first rational, in fact is one of its major functions. Yet while many today see this use of analogy, they dead-end its use through insisting that the probability or “verity” of an analogy can only be determined empirically. Thus they see inductive reasoning as the end rather than a means to the development of human thought. But I also believe that the importance of analogy to the natural mind can easily be overlooked by New Churchmen, because of the ex-tremely common usage in both the philosophical works and the Writings of such terms as comparison, similitude, analogy, etc., as if they were identical with the terms signification or cor-respondence. Thus we tend to try to get the mind to think spiritually from cause’s without first developing the fundamental processes of natural thought as a nexus or bridge. In this way we do not see perhaps as clearly as we should the exercise of analogical thought as an important step towards the later develop-ment of spiritual thought itself.

What is the memory? How does it work? The learning func-tion is of such importance to us in our daily lives that philosophers and scientists have striven for centuries to understand the pro-cesses of the human mind: how it acquires knowledge, stores it, and retrieves it for use when required.