The elaboration of metaphors is an important way in which human beings disclose their innermost feelings and beliefs. Metaphors, to use Max Black's terminology, present a ‘principal subject’ in terms of a ‘subsidiary’ one. A subsidiary subject consists of a ‘system of things’ which implies certain ‘commonplaces’ about itself. The system of things may therefore express some fundamental notions about the metaphor-maker and his world. The system is but a symbol and, as Paul Tillich, Colin Turbayne, and Mary Douglas have argued from their different points of view, the choice of symbols in religion reflects basic attitudes and assumptions about God and nature, society and mankind.

What then does the military metaphor reflect? What are the attitudes and assumptions which ‘conflict’ has expressed for historians of the post-Darwinian controversies? Most obviously, perhaps, it reveals the absence of any deep moral aversion from war. Historians would not have elected to portray the interaction of scientists and theologians in a figure which features violence and inhumanity had they been convinced that these things should be deplored. To ask why historians have not been so convinced, however, is to suggest a second level of analysis. The military metaphor has proved a congenial figure of speech because, as the foregoing chapters repeatedly illustrate, historians have been children of their times. They have employed the vocabulary of a milieu in which they themselves were partisans and participants.