Ah,Metaphor!

Sometimes it just flashes out, even third-hand, and stops you in your tracks, forcing you to consider all the possible ways the comparison might operate.

Even on a crowded subway, this just opened up a world of thought:

In the pre-fascist era in which he experienced his philosophical prime Martin Heidegger once described sociology as a "cat burglar" in contrast to philosophy. It clambers around on the outside of the building of philosophy, stealing whatever the honest philosophical craftsmen are building and growing" (Adorno 166).

The quote is from Theodor Adorno's lecture series, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1959, Stanford 2001): Adorno is trying to find room for a socially constituted being within Kant's transcendental subject while distancing himself from what he considers to be psychologically based glosses on the subject, which he finds in Heidegger.

But sociological cat burglars invading the homes of reason while philosophers sleep? That's hot.