“…The figure of speech is a brilliant—an excellent example of the aberration of thought I have described as “poetism.” Its danger is to create an illusion of serious explanatory significance which is not wholly dispelled by an excusatory “it is as if….”

Peter Medawar, “Getting it Right and Wrong,” in The Spectator (© 1974 by The Spectator; reprinted by permission of The Spectator), April 27, 1974, p. 515.