Chroniclings

If the Chronicler should be favored with the experience frequently enjoyed by gentlemen in ancient folklore and modern romance, of having his animation suspended for a few centuries and "coming to" in A.D. 2405, let us say, with his twentieth-century memories, standards, and points of view unimpaired, he would no doubt find much to surprise him in his new environment. He does not think, though, that he would be greatly surprised to find all mechanical means of communication between mind and mind as obsolete as telegraph wires seem likely soon to be, mind reading as universal an accomplishment as breathing now is, every one's inmost thoughts an open book for every one else, and the secrets of all hearts disclosed. The Chronicler fully expects this to come to pass in the natural and ordinary course of human development before the history of the human race reaches "Finis." The expectation is not merely fanciful. It is based on reasons whose full statement is now unnecessary, because the mere suggestion that such a development is possible is all-sufficient for the purposes of this Chronicling. Attention, though, may briefly be called, in passing, to these facts: First, the extreme inadequacy for their purpose of all existing mechanical means, including written and spoken language, of communication between mind and mind, which suggests the inevitability of their supersession by something better, because men are not going to remain always content to be islands "shouting unintelligibilities to each other across seas of misunderstanding." Second, the obvious impossibility that men can ever attain to the realization of even human ideals of human perfection so long as it is possible for a man to hide his real mind from his fellow-men and so long as his thoughts are almost wholly free from the wholesome restraint imposed on daily actions by "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind."

But though the Chronicler would not be surprised, under the given conditions, to find himself living in an age of universal telepathy, with his crude, undisciplined, anarchistic twentieth-century mentality utterly bared to all the minds about him, he would no doubt be greatly inconvenienced and embarrassed. He even suspects that the twenty-fifth century persons about him might regard him as a criminal so dangerous, and a source of corrupting error so menacing that they must, for the continued welfare of society, relegate him to permanent unconsciousness, and that he himself would welcome his relegation as a refuge from intolerable shame. And, mind you, the Chronicler, who is by no means a self-depreciating person, has no idea that his inmost thoughts are in the least degree more unfit for publication than those of most of his contemporaries. Consider your own case, good reader. You are, the Chronicler takes for granted, a most respectable and worthy person, loved and honored by many whose good opinion you value. How would you like to live in a community of mind-readers; to be aware that every least, unspoken thought that found even momentary lodgment in your mind was known to all your neighbors and that you couldn't possibly help it? Don't you think you'd move out of that telepathic neighborhood in a hurry? You have dreamed—everybody has—of finding yourself publicly appearing in a state of extreme dishabille, unable to escape from the eyes of the multitude, unable to find aught wherewith to veil yourself, unable to reach a hiding-place. You can recall the feeling of shame and wretchedness which that rather common form of nightmare brings with it. Suppose that, in your dream, it was not merely your body, but your soul that crouched naked before all the world of those who love and those who hate you. What sort of a nightmare would that be? Is there a human being alive who can, without a touch of terror, contemplate the possibility of an invention or discovery that shall lay bare to all the world his every thought? Life would be intolerable, impossible even, under such conditions, you say. And you are right, premising that men are as slovenly about their minds, as careless about the visitors they admit to the sanctuary of their mentality, when this supposed invention or discovery is perfected, as they are now. There is no disputing your contention, and your contention is a terrible arraignment of humanity in its present stage of development and of modern civilization. It is a confession that the world is inhabited exclusively by whitened sepulchers, inwardly full of corruption and dead men's bones of savagery, folly, error, superstitions, fears, wickednesses.

Consider the supreme importance among the facts of human life, as we know it, of man's thoughts. Humanly speaking, there are no other facts in life. What men think, that they are. Our thoughts are our lives. In them alone we [mortals] live, and move, and have our being. They make all our happiness and all our sorrow. Even in the material world about us there is not one artificial thing, great or small, that is aught but a human thought expressed in one or another material medium. In a phrase, thought is "all there is of it." ... [Who can say that mind is] the product of certain material machinery—tubular and vesicular neurine and so on—packed within our material bodies, set going by its own inherent power, for the purpose of manufacturing thought and continuing automatically to turn out thought until it is broken or worn out, when it stops and thought ceases? Who can accept such nonsense seriously?