Whenever I try to communicate
with my friend, I must first call up the central office, as it is
briefly called and longly executed. Not until attention there has been
with difficulty obtained can I come into connection with my friend;
for through a human consciousness at that mediating point every
message must pass. In that central office are accordingly three
necessary things; viz., an incoming wire, a consciousness, and an
outgoing wire; and I am helpless till all these three have been
brought into cooperation. Really I have often thought life too short
for the performance of such tasks. And apparently our Creator thought
so at the beginning, when in contriving machinery for us he dispensed
with the hindering factor of a central office operator. For applied to
our previous example of a flash of light, the incoming message
corresponds to the sensuous report of the flash, the outgoing message
to the closure of the eye, and the unfortunate central office girl has
disappeared. The afferent nerve reports directly to the efferent,
without passing the message through consciousness. A fortune awaits
him who will contrive a similar improvement for the telephone. A
special sound sent into the switch-box must automatically, and without
human intervention, oblige an indicated wire to take up the uttered
words.
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