1. Examples include: “equity is not past the age of childbearing”, the legitimate exercise of judicial creativity in “filling the gaps”, the “twin streams of equity and the common law” and “the need to come to equity with clean hands.”
2. We do recognise the difficulties implicit in the attempt to provide such a definition. Although we can neither discuss at length nor resolve these difficulties, we can recognise that these difficulties arise, in part, from the operation of the “hermeneutical circle” the paradox that, in order to gain an adequate knowledge of how legal metaphors operate and their nature, we must first possess at least a vague and commonsensical understanding of what constitutes both a metaphor generally and a legal metaphor in particular.
3. It is conceivable that a judge could devise a metaphor that used a non-physical object, such as the replacement of the clean hands metaphor in equity with a reference to the properties of angels.
4. References to such analysis are provided in later sections.