31وَعَلَّمَ آدَمَ الأَسماءَ كُلَّها ثُمَّ عَرَضَهُم عَلَى المَلائِكَةِ فَقالَ أَنبِئوني بِأَسماءِ هٰؤُلاءِ إِن كُنتُم صادِقينَMuhammad AsadAnd He imparted unto Adam the names of all things;1 then He brought them within the ken of the angels and said: "Declare unto Me the names of these [things], if what you say is true."2Lit., "all the names". The term ism ("name") implies, according to all philologists, an expression "conveying the knowledge [of a thing] ... applied to denote a substance or an accident or an attribute, for the purpose of distinction" (Lane IV, 1435): in philosophical terminology, a "concept". From this it may legitimately be inferred that the "knowledge of all the names" denotes here man's faculty of logical definition and, thus, of conceptual thinking. That by "Adam" the whole human race is meant here becomes obvious from the preceding reference, by the angels, to "such as will spread corruption on earth and will shed blood", as well as from 7:11.Namely, that it was they who, by virtue of their purity, were better qualified to "inherit the earth".