[148] Quite excellently does Moses ascribe the bestowal of names also to the first man (Gen. 2:19): for this is the business of wisdom and royalty, and the first man was wise with a wisdom learned from and taught by Wisdom’s own lips, for he was made by divine hands; he was, moreover, a king, and it befits a ruler to bestow titles on his several subordinates. And we may guess that the sovereignty with which that first man was invested was a most lofty one, seeing that God had fashioned him with the utmost care and deemed him worthy of the second place, making him His own viceroy and lord of all others. For men born many generations later, when, owing to the lapse of ages, the race had lost its vigour, are none the less still masters of the creatures that are without reason, keeping safe a torch (as it were) of sovereignty and dominion passed down from the first man.
[149] So Moses says that God brought all the animals to Adam, wishing to see what appellations he would assign to them severally. Not that he was in any doubt—for to God nothing is unknown—but because He knew that He had formed in mortal man the natural ability to reason of his own motion, that so He Himself might have no share in faulty action. No, He was putting man to the test, as a teacher does a pupil, kindling his innate capacity, and calling on him to put forth some faculty of his own, that by his own ability man might confer titles in no wise incongruous or unsuitable, but bringing out clearly the traits of the creatures who bore them.
[150] For the native reasoning power in the soul being still unalloyed, and no infirmity or disease or evil affection having intruded itself, he received the impressions made by bodies and objects in their sheer reality, and the titles he gave were fully apposite, for right well did he divine the character of the creatures he was describing, with the result that their natures were apprehended as soon as their names were uttered. So greatly did he excel in all noble traits, thus attaining the very limit of human happiness.