Majāz ʿaqlī is the attribution of an act or predicate to something associated with it but not regarded as its proper bearer. A relevant relationship and a contextual clue make the transfer intelligible.
أَنْبَتَ الرَّبِيعُ الْبَقْلَ
Spring made the vegetation grow.
A speaker who regards God as the real agent may nevertheless attribute growth to spring because of the seasonal connection. The transfer lies in who receives the predication. The word “spring” need not itself be a word-level metaphor.
This is the defining distinction between rational metaphor and metaphor operating principally through a lexical substitution.