Even absolute metaphors therefore have a history. They have a history in a more radical sense than concepts, for the historical transformation of a metaphor brings to light the metakinetics of the historical horizons of meaning and ways of seeing within which concepts undergo their modifications. Through this implicative connection, the relationship of metaphorology to the history of concepts (in the narrower, terminological sense) is defined as an ancillary one: metaphorology seeks to burrow down to the substructure of thought, the underground, the nutrient solution of systematic crystallizations; but it also aims to show with what ‘courage’ the mind pre-empts itself in its images, and how its history is projected in the courage of its conjectures.

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology (2010)

Given the chronological stratification of our brain and the fossil character of the elder parts lying below the cerebrum, what we propose can rightly be described as a type of ‘paleontology of the soul’.

Hoimar von Ditfurth, Der Geist fiel nicht vom Himmel (1976)