What Is Man? de Mark Twain

What Is Man?

Mark Twain

1stworld Library

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - The Old Man and the Young Man had been conversing. The Old Man had asserted that the human being is merely a machine, and nothing more. The Young Man objected, and asked him to go into particulars and furnish his reasons for his position.] Old Man. What are the materials of which a steam-engine is made? Young Man. Iron, steel, brass, white-metal, and so on. O.M. Where are these found? Y.M. In the rocks. O.M. In a pure state? Y.M. No - in ores. O.M. Are the metals suddenly deposited in the ores?

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MARK TWAIN (1835-1910), pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was an American writer, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer who became one of America's greatest and most popular writers. Twain was born in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, the state which influenced much of his writing. Twain acquired fame for his travel stories such as Life on the Mississippi (1883), and for his boyhood adventure novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).

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Mark Twain's skeptical assessment of free will, and determinism, religious belief, and the nature of humanity. He put off publishing it for 25 years, and then released it anonymously in a limited edition of 250 copies. The book takes the form of a Socratic dialogue between a romantic young idealist and an elderly cynic, who debate such issues as whether personal merit is meaningless given how our environment shapes who we are, and whether man has any impulse other than pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain.