A conspicuous branch of the department of figurative transfer, and one of indispensable importance in the history of language, is the application of terms having a physical, sensible meaning, to the designation of intellectual and moral conceptions and their relations.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.88

Every figurative transfer which ever made a successful designation for some non-sensible act or relation, before undesignated, rested upon a previous perception of analogy between the one thing and the other […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.137

The particular mode of transfer by which new expression is most abundantly won is the figurative […] But, rich as are its contributions to the absolute needs of expression, especially in the department of intellectual and relational language, they are by no means limited to that.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.111-112