CHAPTER XXIA Theory of CommunicationFor surely once, they feel, we wereParts of a single continent.Matthew Arnold.Artificialmysteries 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.For communication defined as strict transference of or participation in identical experiences does not occur. This is not a heart-breaking conclusion. No general theory, in fact, as to the nature or conditions of experiences can affect their value. For value is prior to all explanations. If actual transference and participation did occur we should of course be compelled to adopt a transcendental theory. It does not occur*and no arguments which assume it have the least weight.All that occurs is that, under certain conditions, separate minds have closely similar experiences. Those who are unable to accept this view reject it not on grounds of evidence, not through the ways in which the world influences them, but on grounds of desire, due to the influence of the contrary opinion on their attitudes to their fellows. At moments anyone may wish it otherwise; severance seems a deprivation; caught in a moment of maladjustment we feel that our essential insularity is a blight and a defect, and to accept the facts and upon them to found a new and more perfect adjustment is for all sensitive people in some situations difficult. But the true belief does not, and perhaps no true belief can, really deprive anyone of any values. Sad cases of bad systematisations there doubtless are, for which no readjustment is possible. A false belief may become an indispensable condition for the most important activities of individuals who without it break down into confusion. So it is with many religious beliefs; and in saying that the removal of such beliefs need involve no loss, and may involve great gains in values, we do not say that there are not certain individuals whose values will be destroyed in the process. We say only that adaptable people will find that most of their values can be retained after rejecting their errors, that compensations and equivalents for their losses are available, and that whole sets of fresh values become open to them through their better adjustment to the actual world in which they live. This is the justification for the opinion which has so often been held, that knowledge is the greatest of all goods. The opinion appears to be warranted. Knowledgeis, we are slowly finding out, an indispensable condition for the attainment of the widest, most stable, and most important values.We start then from the natural isolation and severance of minds. Their experiences at the best, under the most favourable circumstances, can be but similar. Communication, we shall say, takes place when one mind so acts upon its environment that another mind is influenced, and in that other mind an experience occurs which is like the experience in the first mind, and is caused in part by that experience. Communication is evidently a complicated affair, and capable of degrees at least in two respects. The two experiences may be more or less similar, and the second may be more or less dependent upon the first. If A and B are walking in the street together and A touches B and says, “There is the Lord Chief Justice,” B’s experience while he contemplates the dignitary is only adventitiously dependent upon A’s experience. But if A, having met the Lord Chief Justice, describes him to a friend afterwards in a quarry at Portland, for example, his friend’s experience will depend very largely upon the particular judges he may himself have encountered, and for the rest will derive its special features from A’s description. Unless A has remarkable gifts of description and B extraordinarily sensitive and discriminating receptive ability, their two experiences will tally at best but roughly. They may completely fail to tally without either being clearly aware of the fact.In general, long and varied acquaintanceship, close familiarity, lives whose circumstances have often corresponded, in short an exceptional fund of common experience is needed, if people, in the absence of special communicative gifts, active and receptive, are to communicate, and even with these gifts the success of the communication in difficult cases depends upon the extent to which past similarities in experience can be made use of. Without such similarities communication is impossible. Difficult cases are those in which the speaker must himself supply and control a large part of the causes of the listener’s experience; in which correspondingly the listener has to struggle against the intrusions of elements from his own past experience which are irrelevant. When A can point and B gaze, the matter is sometimes easy; although, as is well known, a complex object, for example a landscape, where many different selections are possible corresponding to different emphases of interest, cannot be dealt with in so simple a manner. Less complex things in which the interesting feature is more salient, for example, a gentleman asleep in Church, may be merely indicated with more confidence of communication, although here again one person may feel indignation and another amusement at the sight.In difficult cases the vehicle of communication must inevitably be complex. The effect of a word varies with the other words among which it is placed. What would be highly ambiguous by itself becomes definite in a suitable context. So it is throughout; the effect of any element depends upon the other elements present with it. Even in such shallow communication as is involved in merely making out the letters in a handwriting this principle is all-important, and in the deepest forms of communication the same principle holds good. To this is due the superiority of verse to prose for the most difficult and deepest communications, poetry being by far the more complex vehicle. A similar instance is the increased ambiguity of a monochromatic reproduction as compared with the original painting. Whatdifficultyof communication depends upon we have already considered. It should not be confused with the difficulty of the matter communicated, although the two are often connected. Some very difficult calculations, for example, can be communicated with ease.Depthof communication likewise is not necessarily connected with difficulty. It is a name for the degree of completeness in the response required. A glance at the diagram on p. 116 will make this use of the term clear. Communications involving attitudes are deeper than those in which references alone are concerned. Abstract and analytic prose, in fact, depends for its success upon the shallowness of its draught. It must avoid any stirring of the emotions lest its required distinctions become obscured.
CHAPTER XXIA Theory of CommunicationFor surely once, they feel, we wereParts of a single continent.Matthew Arnold.Artificialmysteries 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.For communication defined as strict transference of or participation in identical experiences does not occur. This is not a heart-breaking conclusion. No general theory, in fact, as to the nature or conditions of experiences can affect their value. For value is prior to all explanations. If actual transference and participation did occur we should of course be compelled to adopt a transcendental theory. It does not occur*and no arguments which assume it have the least weight.All that occurs is that, under certain conditions, separate minds have closely similar experiences. Those who are unable to accept this view reject it not on grounds of evidence, not through the ways in which the world influences them, but on grounds of desire, due to the influence of the contrary opinion on their attitudes to their fellows. At moments anyone may wish it otherwise; severance seems a deprivation; caught in a moment of maladjustment we feel that our essential insularity is a blight and a defect, and to accept the facts and upon them to found a new and more perfect adjustment is for all sensitive people in some situations difficult. But the true belief does not, and perhaps no true belief can, really deprive anyone of any values. Sad cases of bad systematisations there doubtless are, for which no readjustment is possible. A false belief may become an indispensable condition for the most important activities of individuals who without it break down into confusion. So it is with many religious beliefs; and in saying that the removal of such beliefs need involve no loss, and may involve great gains in values, we do not say that there are not certain individuals whose values will be destroyed in the process. We say only that adaptable people will find that most of their values can be retained after rejecting their errors, that compensations and equivalents for their losses are available, and that whole sets of fresh values become open to them through their better adjustment to the actual world in which they live. This is the justification for the opinion which has so often been held, that knowledge is the greatest of all goods. The opinion appears to be warranted. Knowledgeis, we are slowly finding out, an indispensable condition for the attainment of the widest, most stable, and most important values.We start then from the natural isolation and severance of minds. Their experiences at the best, under the most favourable circumstances, can be but similar. Communication, we shall say, takes place when one mind so acts upon its environment that another mind is influenced, and in that other mind an experience occurs which is like the experience in the first mind, and is caused in part by that experience. Communication is evidently a complicated affair, and capable of degrees at least in two respects. The two experiences may be more or less similar, and the second may be more or less dependent upon the first. If A and B are walking in the street together and A touches B and says, “There is the Lord Chief Justice,” B’s experience while he contemplates the dignitary is only adventitiously dependent upon A’s experience. But if A, having met the Lord Chief Justice, describes him to a friend afterwards in a quarry at Portland, for example, his friend’s experience will depend very largely upon the particular judges he may himself have encountered, and for the rest will derive its special features from A’s description. Unless A has remarkable gifts of description and B extraordinarily sensitive and discriminating receptive ability, their two experiences will tally at best but roughly. They may completely fail to tally without either being clearly aware of the fact.In general, long and varied acquaintanceship, close familiarity, lives whose circumstances have often corresponded, in short an exceptional fund of common experience is needed, if people, in the absence of special communicative gifts, active and receptive, are to communicate, and even with these gifts the success of the communication in difficult cases depends upon the extent to which past similarities in experience can be made use of. Without such similarities communication is impossible. Difficult cases are those in which the speaker must himself supply and control a large part of the causes of the listener’s experience; in which correspondingly the listener has to struggle against the intrusions of elements from his own past experience which are irrelevant. When A can point and B gaze, the matter is sometimes easy; although, as is well known, a complex object, for example a landscape, where many different selections are possible corresponding to different emphases of interest, cannot be dealt with in so simple a manner. Less complex things in which the interesting feature is more salient, for example, a gentleman asleep in Church, may be merely indicated with more confidence of communication, although here again one person may feel indignation and another amusement at the sight.In difficult cases the vehicle of communication must inevitably be complex. The effect of a word varies with the other words among which it is placed. What would be highly ambiguous by itself becomes definite in a suitable context. So it is throughout; the effect of any element depends upon the other elements present with it. Even in such shallow communication as is involved in merely making out the letters in a handwriting this principle is all-important, and in the deepest forms of communication the same principle holds good. To this is due the superiority of verse to prose for the most difficult and deepest communications, poetry being by far the more complex vehicle. A similar instance is the increased ambiguity of a monochromatic reproduction as compared with the original painting. Whatdifficultyof communication depends upon we have already considered. It should not be confused with the difficulty of the matter communicated, although the two are often connected. Some very difficult calculations, for example, can be communicated with ease.Depthof communication likewise is not necessarily connected with difficulty. It is a name for the degree of completeness in the response required. A glance at the diagram on p. 116 will make this use of the term clear. Communications involving attitudes are deeper than those in which references alone are concerned. Abstract and analytic prose, in fact, depends for its success upon the shallowness of its draught. It must avoid any stirring of the emotions lest its required distinctions become obscured.
For surely once, they feel, we wereParts of a single continent.Matthew Arnold.
For surely once, they feel, we wereParts of a single continent.
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent.
Matthew Arnold.
Artificialmysteries 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.
For communication defined as strict transference of or participation in identical experiences does not occur. This is not a heart-breaking conclusion. No general theory, in fact, as to the nature or conditions of experiences can affect their value. For value is prior to all explanations. If actual transference and participation did occur we should of course be compelled to adopt a transcendental theory. It does not occur*and no arguments which assume it have the least weight.
All that occurs is that, under certain conditions, separate minds have closely similar experiences. Those who are unable to accept this view reject it not on grounds of evidence, not through the ways in which the world influences them, but on grounds of desire, due to the influence of the contrary opinion on their attitudes to their fellows. At moments anyone may wish it otherwise; severance seems a deprivation; caught in a moment of maladjustment we feel that our essential insularity is a blight and a defect, and to accept the facts and upon them to found a new and more perfect adjustment is for all sensitive people in some situations difficult. But the true belief does not, and perhaps no true belief can, really deprive anyone of any values. Sad cases of bad systematisations there doubtless are, for which no readjustment is possible. A false belief may become an indispensable condition for the most important activities of individuals who without it break down into confusion. So it is with many religious beliefs; and in saying that the removal of such beliefs need involve no loss, and may involve great gains in values, we do not say that there are not certain individuals whose values will be destroyed in the process. We say only that adaptable people will find that most of their values can be retained after rejecting their errors, that compensations and equivalents for their losses are available, and that whole sets of fresh values become open to them through their better adjustment to the actual world in which they live. This is the justification for the opinion which has so often been held, that knowledge is the greatest of all goods. The opinion appears to be warranted. Knowledgeis, we are slowly finding out, an indispensable condition for the attainment of the widest, most stable, and most important values.
We start then from the natural isolation and severance of minds. Their experiences at the best, under the most favourable circumstances, can be but similar. Communication, we shall say, takes place when one mind so acts upon its environment that another mind is influenced, and in that other mind an experience occurs which is like the experience in the first mind, and is caused in part by that experience. Communication is evidently a complicated affair, and capable of degrees at least in two respects. The two experiences may be more or less similar, and the second may be more or less dependent upon the first. If A and B are walking in the street together and A touches B and says, “There is the Lord Chief Justice,” B’s experience while he contemplates the dignitary is only adventitiously dependent upon A’s experience. But if A, having met the Lord Chief Justice, describes him to a friend afterwards in a quarry at Portland, for example, his friend’s experience will depend very largely upon the particular judges he may himself have encountered, and for the rest will derive its special features from A’s description. Unless A has remarkable gifts of description and B extraordinarily sensitive and discriminating receptive ability, their two experiences will tally at best but roughly. They may completely fail to tally without either being clearly aware of the fact.
In general, long and varied acquaintanceship, close familiarity, lives whose circumstances have often corresponded, in short an exceptional fund of common experience is needed, if people, in the absence of special communicative gifts, active and receptive, are to communicate, and even with these gifts the success of the communication in difficult cases depends upon the extent to which past similarities in experience can be made use of. Without such similarities communication is impossible. Difficult cases are those in which the speaker must himself supply and control a large part of the causes of the listener’s experience; in which correspondingly the listener has to struggle against the intrusions of elements from his own past experience which are irrelevant. When A can point and B gaze, the matter is sometimes easy; although, as is well known, a complex object, for example a landscape, where many different selections are possible corresponding to different emphases of interest, cannot be dealt with in so simple a manner. Less complex things in which the interesting feature is more salient, for example, a gentleman asleep in Church, may be merely indicated with more confidence of communication, although here again one person may feel indignation and another amusement at the sight.
In difficult cases the vehicle of communication must inevitably be complex. The effect of a word varies with the other words among which it is placed. What would be highly ambiguous by itself becomes definite in a suitable context. So it is throughout; the effect of any element depends upon the other elements present with it. Even in such shallow communication as is involved in merely making out the letters in a handwriting this principle is all-important, and in the deepest forms of communication the same principle holds good. To this is due the superiority of verse to prose for the most difficult and deepest communications, poetry being by far the more complex vehicle. A similar instance is the increased ambiguity of a monochromatic reproduction as compared with the original painting. Whatdifficultyof communication depends upon we have already considered. It should not be confused with the difficulty of the matter communicated, although the two are often connected. Some very difficult calculations, for example, can be communicated with ease.Depthof communication likewise is not necessarily connected with difficulty. It is a name for the degree of completeness in the response required. A glance at the diagram on p. 116 will make this use of the term clear. Communications involving attitudes are deeper than those in which references alone are concerned. Abstract and analytic prose, in fact, depends for its success upon the shallowness of its draught. It must avoid any stirring of the emotions lest its required distinctions become obscured.