“Yes, that’s so,” said Irving Strong, reading from one of Phil’s Cincinnati newspapers:
“‘Red hair’—a man might dye that—‘parted on the left side and brushed forward’—he might part it in the middle and brush it back, or have it all cut off with one of those mowing machines the barbers use, just as Jim Hughes does with his—”
“Now I come to think of it,” continued Irv, after a moment’s thought, “Jim answers the description in several ways,—limps a little with his left leg, has red hair when he permits himself to have any hair at all, has lost a front tooth, and speaks with a slight lisp.”
“Oh, Jim Hughes isn’t a bank burglar,” exclaimed Will Moreraud. “He hasn’t sense enough for anything of that sort.”
“Of course not,” said Irv. “I didn’t mean to suggest anything of the kind. I merely cited his peculiarities to show how easily a detective’s description might lead men into mistakes. Why, Jim might even be arrested on that description.”
“But all that isn’t what Macaulay meant,” said Ed. “He meant that a man never really knows what he thinks about any subject till he has put his thought into words and then turned it over and looked at it and found out exactly what it is.”
“I guess that’s so,” drawled Irv. “I notice that whenever I try to think seriously—”
The boys all laughed. The idea of Irv Strong’s thinking seriously seemed peculiarly humorous to them.
“Well, I do try sometimes,” said Irv, “and whenever I do, I put the whole thing into the exactest words I can find. Very often, when I get it into exact words, I find that my opinions won’t hang together and I’ve got to reconstruct them.”
“Exactly!” said Ed Lowry. “And that is the great difficulty animals have in trying to think. They haven’t any words even in their minds. They can’t put their thoughts into form so as to examine them. It seems to me that language is necessary to any real thinking, and that it is the possession of language more than anything or everything else that makes man really the lord of creation.”