Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/145

 MENTAL TELEGRAPHY

were matters which many of the foremost minds in the world were busy thinking about. But perhaps one man in each case did the telegraphing to the others. The aberrations which gave Leverrier the idea that there must be a planet of such and such mass and such and such orbit hidden from sight out yonder in the remote abysses of space were not new ; they had been noticed by astronomers for genera tions. Then why should it happen to occur to three people, widely separated Leverrier, Mrs. Somer- ville, and Adams to suddenly go to worrying about those aberrations all at the same time, and set them selves to work to find out what caused them, and to measure and weigh an invisible planet, and calculate its orbit, and hunt it down and catch it? a strange project which nobody but they had ever thought of before. If one astronomer had invented that odd and happy project fifty years before, don t you think he would have telegraphed it to several others without knowing it?

But now I come to a puzzler. How is it that inanimate objects are able to affect the mind? They seem to do that. However, I wish to throw in a parenthesis first just a reference to a thing every body is familiar with the experience of receiving a clear and particular answer to your telegram before your telegram has reached the sender of the answer. That is a case where your telegram has gone straight from your brain to the man it was meant for, far outstripping the wire s slow electricity, and it is an exercise of mental telegraphy which is as common as dining. To return to the influence of inanimate

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