Mental Retention.--In answer to this it may be said that these represent conditions in which determined effort is made to keep all possible information that may be in the minds of all concerned from passing to others. Everyone concedes the power of such absolute self retention of our thoughts, when we deliberately wish to keep them from being known to others. When people wish to communicate their thoughts to others, then it may be different. In that case the sending and receiving minds are both active and the conditions for interaction, if it were at all possible, would be favorable. Just this condition obtains in the court room every day. An innocent prisoner wants with all his heart and soul to communicate the idea of his innocence to the judge and jury. Of course, he does not succeed by telepathic means in transferring to them any inkling of the truth. On the contrary, his very nervousness and anxiety to set himself right before them will sometimes actually cause prejudice. The rule that has thus been exemplified in our courts of law holds for all business transactions. The ordinary customs of business presume that the buyer does not know what the seller paid for the particular article that is being exchanged, and it is on the strength of this that profit becomes possible. A few telepathic merchants or customers would work serious havoc in business life. What thus holds for important affairs in life is just as strikingly exemplified in the trivial round of social existence and in our intercourse with friends. Suppose one woman knew what another woman thought of her! That charming, old-fashioned institution "courting" would go entirely by {144} the board, if there were any such thing as real telepathy. In general, social life in all its features would become very, very different to what it is. How Much Slight External Expression Conveys.--Mrs. Coventry Patmore, the English poet's wife, once told a little story of some people who lived in a distant island where the inhabitants possessed tails. These tails were, as they are on the animals, organs of expression, but of involuntary and quite unconscious expression. It was utterly impossible for the people there to say nice things to one another when they had quite other things in mind, because if they did not like the person their tails hung down behind; if they did like them they wagged rather vigorously, no matter what their owner might be saying. This simple revelation of feelings, so much less than even the slightest degree of telepathy would occasion, was quite enough to work a revolution in the social affairs of this romantic island. It made the people truthful and candid in their relations with one another.