B1212 <=> B1214 [BTG XLVIII From the Author, p. 1213]

For any man who has become aware of this to some degree, and has learned more or less how to observe, this “tragicomic feast of sound” is particularly sharply constated and made evident when others join the conversation of two contemporary people.

Each of them puts his own subjective sense into all the words that have become gravity-center words in the said so to say “symphony of words without content,” and to the ear of this impartial observer it is all perceived only as what is called in the ancient Sinokooloopianian tales of The Thousand and One Nights, “cacophonous-fantastic-nonsense.”

Conversing in this fashion, contemporary people nevertheless imagine they understand one another and are certain that they are conveying their thoughts to each other.

We, on the other hand, relying upon a mass of indisputable data confirmed by psycho-physico-chemical experiments, categorically affirm that as long as contemporary people remain as they are, that is to say “average people,” they will never, whatever they may be talking about among themselves, and particularly if the subject be abstract, understand the same notions by the same words nor will they ever actually comprehend one another.

This is why in the contemporary average man, every inner experience and even every painful experience which engenders mentation and which has obtained logical results which might in other circumstances be very beneficent to those round about, is not manifested outwardly but is only transformed into so to say an “enslaving factor” for him himself.