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#2.
Names: their place and importance.
pp. 74 - 78
If man be created in the image of God, and if man be placed over the work of His
hands, we should expect that he would possess a nature above that of the brute creation:
in other words, that he would be a rational being. This we know to be the case: whereas
animals act merely under the power of instinct, man acts under the influence of reason.
The first recorded act of man is found in Gen. 2: 19:--
"And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof."
Those who deny the inspiration of Scripture, and look upon Genesis as a collection of
myths and legends, have to account for the scientific accuracy of its most incidental
details. What is it that we find in the forefront of any text book on logic? The necessity
of names:--
"If we attempt to . . . . . analyze . . . . . the import of propositions we find forced upon
us, as a subject of previous consideration, the import of name" (J.S.M.*).
Thus Adam is exhibited in Gen. 2: acting as a rational being, giving names to all the
lower creation that passed before him as a necessary first step to fuller and clearer
understanding.
Hobbes, in his Computation of Logic, says:--
"A name is a word taken at pleasure to serve for a mark which may raise in our mind a
thought like to some thought we had before, and which being pronounced to others, may
be to them a sign of what thought the speaker had before in his mind."
This is the simplest definition of a name. Names may stand for more than this; in
Scripture, for instance, names are often prophetic, but in the simplest analysis names are
marks, and it is of the utmost importance that when two or more people converse, they
should agree that certain marks or names stand for certain ideas or things, otherwise
confusion must follow. And here the accuracy of the history of Babel is seen. As soon as
certain groups of men began to call ideas and things by names different from those
employed by other groups, confusion followed, and "they left off to build".
When God would mark a crisis in the life of the Patriarch, he changed his name from
Abram to Abraham.
[NOTE * - In this series the initials J.S.M. stand for John Stuart Mill, and all
paragraphs in quotation marks without name or initial must be understood as
quotations from this author's book, entitled A System of Logic.]