in communication with them.

The isolation of the individual life is virtually obliterated by such
an agency. Solitude disappears before it; for he whose ear is within
hearing of his instrument, knows not at what moment any one of many
thousands of people may speak to him. He knows not at what moment
intelligence of an ever-varying kind may be spoken to him from his own
community or out of the depths of distance. The mind is thus
affiliated with an enlarged and ever-present society. These
considerations do not relate to mere matters of convenience and
quickness and advantage and safety, but to the larger question of the
aggregate effect upon the individual.

The effect on the community is of like kind. The community is no
longer so segregated as it was before. The community is in touch with
other communities of like character. The conflagration in one town is
felt in the neighboring towns, if it is not seen. The epidemic of the
one is the epidemic of many. The sensation of the one community
diffuses itself instantly into several. The effect is in the
intellectual life like that of a wave produced on the lake by the
casting in of a stone. The wave widens and recedes. It may be
obstructed or unobstructed in its progress. If obstructed, the
obstructions may be removed. Then the motion of the wave will become
free and regular. So also on the tide of public thought. The telephone
is an agency _for removing mental obstructions_, and for the regular
diffusion of a common thought.

All this, however, is attended with draw-backs. One of these is the
breaking in on the privacy and seclusion of the individual life.
Individuality suffers under scientific progress. Great thinking is
accomplished best in solitude. Emerson has forcibly pointed out the
advantages which arise in the intellectual life from its isolation and
seclusion--from its free and uninterrupted communion with itself.

The convenience--the physical convenience--of life is vastly augmented
by such a contrivance as the telephone. Time is saved and trouble
obviated. But at the same time the necessity for bodily exercise is
reduced, and the overgrowth of brain at the expense of body encouraged.
The fact is that the invention of the telephone and its general use,
while it has added very greatly to the comfort of life, while it has
promoted ease and diffused a social sense that needed stimulation and
development, has at the same time brought in conditions that are not