The Importance of Metaphors

Maths and science is based on very concrete images that come from real life. So even the word abstraction comes from a root meaning drawing something away from its natural home, abstracting it. Even words like immaterial comes from aRoot material which means material, it means wood. Originally its root is martyr the mother and it's the sense of the fertile material world out of which the living like wood comes. And then the immaterial world is something that is piggybacking on that and is contrasting with that. This is the ground of how we think at all - especially in maths and science.