Taking Root

As our insight penetrates deeper and deeper into recesses that were once dark to us we consciously or unconsciously demand more precise description of terms to denote phenomena that obtrude upon our senses but defy our understanding. Upon first appreciating a thing, be it light or sound, an abnormal sensation or an unusual conformation of the body, we give it a name. But we are mentally so endowed that we are not long content with the mere name of a thing. We must know where and how it begins and ends, and through what media it works. We must discover its attributes and, these made plain, we must enlarge and refine our definition and description. As the latter grow more exact there comes the perception that nothing that we sense is isolated or spontaneous. It is born of something and brings forth something. And, once our minds begin to deal with its causes and effects, then we can say that the things has entered our understanding. Then only can we affirm that its name is to us perhaps something more than a mouthful or words.

From "The Nature of Resistance to Tuberculosis" before the New York Academy of Medicine (February 15, 1917) and published in the American Review of Tuberculosis, April 1917.
Found in the book, Environment and Resistance in Tuberculosis, Krause, 1923.

[via Reflective Musings]