B535 <=> B537 (BTG XXXI Last sojourn to Earth, p. 536)

“The inventors of this language must have imagined that a language is like one of their contemporary sciences which can be cooked up at home in one’s study; indeed, it never entered into their heads that every more or less ‘practical’ language can be formed only in the course of many centuries and even then only during the process of more or less normal being-existence.

“This new invention there, this language Esperanto, might however do for our highly esteemed Mullah Nassr Eddin for composing the amusing anecdotes he tell his hens. . . !

“In short, this promising beginning of theirs, in this business of establishing one common planetary language, changed nothing there in their ‘height of absurdity’ and everything remained as before down till now, that is, this comparatively petty planet, with a petty ‘half-dead terra firma,’ continues to remain, as again our dear teacher Mullah Nassr Eddin says, ‘a thousand-tongued-hydra.’

“Well, my boy . . . when I commenced my investigations, in regard this time to the fundamental aim I had set myself, in order to become assuredly aware of all the causes which produced such a peculiar psyche in the presences of the three-brained beings of the planet pleasing to you, and when therefore it soon became necessary for me to make clear certain of what are called ‘hidden details’ in the common presence of this psyche of theirs, there unexpectedly arose for me just at the beginning of this last personal stay of mine among them a very serious difficulty consisting in this: that the bringing to light of these properties hidden within them, namely, the properties found in their subconsciousness, turned out to be possible exclusively only with the intentional help on the part of them themselves, that is, with the help of that consciousness of theirs, which with the flow of time had become proper to be possessed by them during their waking state. Furthermore, I made clear to myself that it was necessary that this said voluntary help should come from the three-brained beings there of all the types of which in general during recent times they had begun to be completely formed.