"Analogia, or ana/logos, signifies 'according to due ratio' and 'according to the same kind of way.' Analogon, then is the proportion or similarity that exists between two or more apparently dissimilar things: like the tensile harmony that Parmenides maintained fitted together fire and earth, or Empedocles believed conjoined love and hate, or Anaxogoras thought tied the visible to the invisible realm. Both ancient and modern, its figures of reconciliation expressed how self could relate to others, how human beings might exist in reciprocity with society or in harmony with nature.
With Plato, Aristotle, the Neoplatonists, Aquinas, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the late Wittgenstein, this elastic knot of unity assumed a wider epistemological meaning than numerical equidistance and logical symmetry. It emerged as a form of dialectics attempting to bridge the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown. Proportionality, or the like and reciprocal relation between two proportions, is distinct from mere identity, the illusion of full adequacy in the explication of one term by means of another."
-Barbara Maria Stafford, Visual Analogy, p8
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