The Psychology of Telephony 31 



directly unto deep. And so it came about tliat the rector of a 

 distant Yorkshire village, what time he spent his leisure making 

 the telephone into a practicable means of day-by-day communica- 

 tion, really wrought more wisely than he knew. He really set 

 out to put the human mind to a severe test^ for the human mind 

 had grown accustomed to the written word as its means of com- 

 munication, and not readily, as I hope you will see, did it fit 

 itself into the new conditions. Telephony is only at the begin- 

 ning, Ave have heard again and again, but I think it is nearer the 

 truth to say that the human mind in its appreciation of the 

 differences which have been wrought by telephony is only at the 

 beginning. 



To begin with, we have not grasped the central fact that the 

 telephone annihilates distance. Whatever may be our explana- 

 tion and our theory of the Kantian categories of time and space, 

 the fact remains that the telephone illustrates how deeply the 

 framework of space is upon our minds. It is shown in the first 

 place by the way we bawl into a telephone. That comes from 

 the idea that the persons to whom we are speaking is far away. 

 We shout as if we were shouting at them across a valley. The 

 fact is that the people are very near to us. They are so near, in 

 fact, that in auditory efficiency they are only a few feet. This is 

 proved by the use of the telephone for persons with inefficient 

 hearing, where the telephone actually is only a few feet distant. 

 But our mental framework is such that we cannot bring ourselves 

 to realize that the telephone has annihilated distance, that it has 

 broken down all walls and barriers, that it has given us a 

 whispering nearness to the person to whom we are speaking. 

 Which of us, using the telephone, realizes for a moment that our 

 lips are to our friend's ear 1 That puts in a phrase the fact that 

 we have but little conception of what the telephone has done in 

 the annihilation of space. 



Now let us examine the content of this conservative 

 psychology. In the first place the phraseology which we use 

 is based on the emphasis of distance. It is as though we thought 



