I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making metaphor the whole of thinking. . . . The mathematical might be difficult for me to bring in, but the scientific is easy enough.
Once on a time all the Greeks were busy telling each other what the All was—or was like unto. . . . But best and most fruitful was Pythagoras’ comparison of the universe with number. Number of what? Number of feet, pounds, and seconds was the answer, and we had science and all that has followed in science. The metaphor has held and held, breaking down only when it came to the spiritual and psychological or the out of the way places of the physical.
[I found the above quoted in Ch. 5 of JAMES MERRILL'S APOCALYPSE by Timothy Materer; here is the citation given in that book's endnote: Selected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), 37.]