ABSTRACT
Artificial mysteries are as prevalent in unreflecting and even in elaborately excogitated opinion upon communication as elsewhere. On the one hand are some who define communication as the actual transference of experiences in the strictest possible sense of transference – the sense in which a penny can be transferred from one pocket to another – and are led to most fantastic hypotheses. Blake seems sometimes to have believed that one single, the same, identical state of mind, imagined as a being or power, can occupy now one mind, now another, or many minds at once. Other thinkers, in less picturesque manners, have fallen back upon no less transcendental considerations as necessities in the explanation of communication. We must suppose, it is alleged, that human minds are wider than we ordinarily believe, that parts of one mind may pass over to become parts of another, that minds interpenetrate and intermingle, or even that particular minds are merely an illusory appearance and the underlying reality one mind whose facets or aspects are many. In this way it is easy to enter the maze. Probably some wanderings in it are unavoidable for all speculative persons at some period of their mental development. The only escape from it is by the original entrance.[175] {135}
