This paper attempts to show the important role that ideology (‘meaning in the service of power’) plays in the nurturing and proliferation of metaphors and metaphoric themes, a psychological and linguistic role that is just as important as bodily experience. It discusses such themes as power is high, sex is violence, disease is invasion, and race is colour, attempting to show how they drive social practices. It also explores how the themes activity is game and quality is quantity (along with such subthemes as time is money and human quality is wealth) have been implicated in the emergence of both capitalist economic philosophy and the Darwinism and neo-Darwinism which developed from it (as represented successively in Hobbes, Smith, Hume, Malthus and Darwin himself).