Roman Jakobson is probably the last homo universalis in the human sciences, who both developed a theory of the mind and applied it to a panoply of disciplines. Jakobson sees the metaphorical and the metonymic poles as the two basic modes or ways of thought reflected in general human behaviour and in language. The metaphorical is based upon substitution and similarity, the metonymic upon predication, contexture and contiguity. These two ways of thought are linked, though not in this paper, but in several other papers of his collected works, to the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axes of linguistic expressions. The metaphorical and the metonymic poles underlie metaphor and metonymy not only in language, but also in fields such as language impairment (especially aphasia), child language acquisition, literature (similarity in poetry, contiguity in the novel), Freud's psycho-analysis, literary and art schools, the history of painting and art movements, folklore such as folk tales and wedding songs. In fact, Jakobson holds out a research challenge not only to linguistics, but to all areas of semiotics (René Dirven)