How Animals Talk 



or its waves outward, as the sun cannot but send 

 forth his light; that it affects men as surely as 

 gravitation or heat or the blow of a hammer af- 

 fects them, all this is reasonably clear and cer- 

 tain. But how thought travels; what refined 

 mental ether conveys it outward with a speed that 

 makes light as slow as a glacier by comparison, 

 and with a force that sends it through walls of 

 stone and into every darkness that the light cannot 

 penetrate, this and the origin of thought are 

 questions so deep that our science has barely 

 formulated them, much less dreamed of an answer. 

 Yet if we once grant the simple proposition that 

 thought is a force, that it moves inevitably from 

 its source to its object, the conclusion is inevitable 

 that any thinking mind should be able to send its 

 silent message to any other mind in the universe. 

 There is nothing in the nature of either mind or 

 matter to preclude such a possibility; only our 

 present habit of speech, of too much speech, pre- 

 vents us from viewing it frankly. 



As a purely speculative consummation, therefore, 

 the time may come when telepathy shall appear 

 as the natural or perfect communication among 

 enlightened minds, and language as a temporary or 

 evolutionary makeshift. But that beckons us away 

 to an imaginative flight among the clouds, and on 

 the earth at our feet is the trail we must follow. 



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