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. What _difficulty_ of 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. _Depth_ of 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. [56] The very strange and important phenomena of apparent telepathy, and the feats of some ‘psychometrists’ and ‘clairvoyants’, although they may call for a great extension of our ideas as to how minds influence one another, do not require any such desperate devices as transference of, or participation in, _identical_ experiences. If they did, the possibility of investigating them by the only technique with which anything has ever been successfully investigated would be remote. On any ‘identity’ or ‘participation’ theory, communication becomes an ineffable and irremovable mystery. There may, of course, be any number of strange events occurring about which we cannot know, but to discuss such events is unprofitable. CHAPTER XXII The Availability of the Poet’s Experience That he is the wisest, the happiest and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally incontrovertible; the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men.—_The Defence of Poetry_.