Suppose, moreover, that you know the tongue of men and are able to ask them questions. You ask particularly about the automobile, which you have mentally compared with the horse; whereupon they take you to the factories in Detroit to see the automobile in process of becoming, under conditions of mass-production, two or three taking life with a snort every minute. In this factory, they tell you, they make only one hundred a day, very fine ones; but in another they make five hundred, and in another five thousand a day. You ask them who makes the horse. They do not know. They teach their children to say God makes it. The horse is a natural thing. Then the automobile is an unnatural thing? They say no, smiling a little. Not an unnatural thing. The automobile is a mechanical thing because they make it themselves. You ask them why they say they make it. At this they are distressed. There has been some slip of understanding in the use of language. They explain it carefully. The horse is born. There is no horse-factory. The automobile is made, as you have seen, in factories. Still it is not explained. You argue it with them. What is it they do in the factory? They perform certain acts in relation to automobiles. These, of course, are necessary, vital acts. If they were not performed, automobiles could not be. And yet, how does this prove they make automobiles? You ask them. They ask you to say what else it could prove. You may say it proves only that they are fathers of automobiles; and, since they seem mystified greatly by this answer, you remind them that in relation to their own children also they perform certain vital acts, essential to beget them and without which children could not be, yet they are never heard to say they make children. They say children are born. This has to be left as it is. Further explanations lead to worse confusion. You ask them certain other questions. How long have they been on the earth—themselves? How long have they had machines? What did they do before they had machines? By their replies certain facts are established in your mind, and from these facts you make certain deductions, all clear enough to you but incomprehensible to them.