This contradiction we may perhaps remove or at least mitigate if we notice that ‘degree of infection’ is a highly ambiguous phrase. It may be equivalent to— (i) the number of persons who may be infected, (ii) the completeness with which the experience is reproduced in them. These are the two most relevant senses here, and both are involved in Tolstoy’s exposition. The first would bring this view into connection with his doctrine that only so far as art is accessible to all men is it valuable. The second, however, cannot be reconciled with that view, but that he held it cannot be doubted. “The more the sensation to be conveyed is special,” he goes on, “the more strongly does it act upon the receiver; the more special the condition of the mind is, to which the reader is transferred, the more willingly and the more powerfully does he blend with it.” This is plainly untrue. What Tolstoy would have said with more reflection is that some special experiences are interesting and owe their attraction partly to their strangeness, their unusual character. But many unusual and special experiences are unattractive and repellent. Dyspeptics, amateurs of psycho-analysis, fishermen, and golfers, have very often most remarkable things to recount. We shun having to listen precisely because they are so special. Further, many experiences by their very oddness are incommunicable. Only so far as common interests are aroused does the ease and completeness of transmission depend upon the rarity and strangeness of the experience communicated. With this proviso Tolstoy’s remark is obviously justified. That he should have stressed it is an indication of his sincerity and candour. So much of his doctrine is a simple denial that special experiences are a fit subject for art. A division between experiences which though special are yet in the main path of humanity and accessible to all men if they are sufficiently finely developed in normal directions, and those other special experiences which are due to abnormality, disease, or eccentric and erratic specialisation, is what he would have added if his attention had been drawn to the point. He would have enjoyed classifying the fashionables and intellectuals, the etiolate cultured classes, among the insane. The second condition of infectiousness, the greater or less clearness of the transmission of the sensation, is more important. How to obtain clear transmission is precisely the problem of communication. We have seen that it is a matter of the availability of common experiences, the elicitation of these by a suitable vehicle, and the control and extrusion of irrelevant elements, so far as they arise, through the complexity of the vehicle.