By WILLIAM HANNA THOMSON, M.D., LL.D.
Author of " Brain and Personality," "What is Physical Life?" etc.
Physician to the Roosevelt Hospital; Consulting Physician to the
New York State Manhattan Hospital for the Insane; formerly
Professor of the Practice of Medicine and Diseases of the Nervous
System, New York University Medical College; Ex-President of the
New York Academy of Medicine, etc.
IN one of Carlyle's earliest productions, dealing with the
philosophy of Clothes, he showed that a man quite plainly reveals
his inner self by what he wears. So we would now discuss what the
being, Man, reveals about himself by his eternal question, "How?"
As language is a lofty endowment and, moreover, on this earth
exclusively human, we would lead up to the subject by stating
what the parts of speech are.
According to the Arabs, who surpass all other peoples in the
study of language--for they claim that they have twenty-five
thousand books on grammar in their literature--the parts of
speech are three; and, as one of their old scholars states, this
threefold division of speech is not confined to one language, but
is universal, because human speech does not differ with the
difference of human tongues. These three parts are: first,
nouns--the names of things; second, verbs--the names of events;
and, third, the partitives--or the words which express the
relations of things to events. Thus the most abstract of verbs,
"to be," refers to an event; for when a man says, "I am," he is
mentioning an event in the history of the universe which did not
occur till he existed.
This division, however, necessitates that the adjectives should
be regarded as nouns; and so they are classed in all Semitic
languages, as the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Syriac, etc. The
writers of the New Testament, therefore, could not write Greek
without continually falling into their native Hebrew idiom; so
that if the passages were translated literally, some modern
expositions would have to be much modified. Thus, "Who created
the worlds by the word of his power" means "Who created the
worlds by his powerful word." "The body of our humiliation" is
"our humiliating body." "Who shall deliver me from the body of
this death?" is "from this deadly body," as the context of the
passage clearly shows. In each case the second noun is the
adjective modifying the first.
Moreover, the most interesting deduction from this division of
the parts of speech is that the partitives are far the highest in
rank among words, because they express pure relations, which only
the royal mind of man can so distinctly perceive as to make words
for them. Thus, a dog can learn his own name, and understand the
verbs "go" and "come," especially with the imperative tone of his
master; but he could never understand the words "outgoing year"
or "incoming year."
Prepositions belong to the partitives, and, with different
prepositions attached to one and the same thing or noun, the
human mind can step through the vast regions of thought as easily
as the ether can vibrate through space. Thus the Latin scriptio,
the name of a thing, a writing, gives us the following changes,
according to the preposition: An Ascription is not a
CONscription, by any means; nor does a conscription mean anything
like a DEScription; nor is that the same thing with an
INscription; nor when we PREscribe for a man are we PROscribing
him; and every one of us knows, when the agent of a worthy cause
enters, what the difference is between a SUBscription and a
SUPERscription.
To the adverbs, however, must be given the preeminence among all
human words. But even here there are gradations in rank. Thus the
adverb, "Why?" may be nothing but a question of curiosity, and
hence its idea may be suggested to an inquisitive monkey. But it
is not so with the question, "How?" "Why?" may be answered by an
affirmation, but "How?" can be answered only by a demonstration.
Now, as our object is to call speech to witness as to what is in
man, or, in other words, what man is himself, we will proceed to
analyze the testimony of this word, "How?"
"HOW" FINDS A PLANET
First: It does not refer to anything which appears on the
surface. Instead, it seeks to find the hidden and the unknown by
following up one clue after another. When the astronomer,
Leverrier, found that the planets Saturn and Uranus did not come
to time, he asked himself how that could be. Meanwhile, the
answer to any number of "hows" must have been previously
demonstrated by him and by other astronomers before the movements
of these great and distant heavenly bodies could be shown as not
according to the clock-like regularity of planets in their
courses. He reasoned that only one probable "how" could account
for the facts; namely, another planet of just such a size and
weight, and moving at just such a distance, would suffice thus to
hold back Saturn and Uranus in their orbits. And so he calculated
how large this heavenly body was, how heavy it was, and then just
where it was, until, by this human but sure detective system,
astronomers caught sight of Neptune--after Leverrier told them
where to look for it.
But, after all, to decide how the vast heavenly bodies move in
space is easy compared with finding out how to make a sewing
machine go. For a needle to thread itself and then rapidly
proceed to sew without the help of fingers calls for the
discovery of more "hows" than are needed to explain Laplace's
"Mecanique celeste." Mass and gravity suffice for the one, but
only a Yankee's mind could have created the other.
We have now come to a great word--"create." A creator is a being
who gives origin to things which would not exist but for his
intelligent purpose and design. Now, man has simply filled this
earth with his own creations, all due to himself alone and to
none other, and all again by pondering the question, "How?" He
began, for instance, by putting a hole through a flint hatchet,
and ended with putting a hole through the Alps. In this last, an
engineer stood at the foot of the great mountain and asked
himself how he could tunnel it for nations to pass through. He
saw a small stream dashing down the mountainside and at once
found his desired "how," for he made that stream work big drills
by compressed air, till the everlasting rocks themselves had to
give in.
But man is an infinite creator--by which we mean that his
creative capacity is limitless and inexhaustible. No sooner does
he create one thing than he turns to create another thing totally
different from it. A locomotive thundering past with a long train
has no resemblance to a telegraph line, nor that, in turn, to a
great printing press. Man coolly sets at defiance the most
fundamental laws of physical science.
Thus, a heavy load of passengers, sitting in no less heavy cars,
if put on a smooth inclined plane must slide down faster and
faster to the bottom, or Vulcan would be confounded. But man
strings a thin wire overhead, which would snap instantly if the
load gave it one pull; but something which, some "how," man
causes to pass along that wire, makes the trolley with its live
freight go uphill faster than a horse can run.