To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift.
Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they
see themselves. But what if these others belong to a different
species and inhabit a radically alien universe? For example,
how can the sane get to know what it actually feels like to be
mad? Or, short of being born again as a visionary, a medium, or
a musical genius, how can we ever visit the worlds which, to Blake,
to Swedenborg, to Johann Sebastian Bach, were home? And how can a
man at the extreme limits of ectomorphy and cerebrotonia ever put
himself in the place of one at the limits of endomorphy and
viscerotonia, or, except within certain circumscribed areas,
share the feelings of one who stands at the limits of mesomorphy
and somatotonia? To the unmitigated behaviorist such questions, I
suppose, are meaningless. But for those who theoretically believe
what in practice they know to be true—namely, that there is an inside
to experience as well as an outside—the problems posed are real problems,
all the more grave for being, some completely insoluble, some soluble
only in exceptional circumstances and by methods not available to
everyone. Thus, it seems virtually certain that I shall never know what
it feels like to be Sir John Falstaff or Joe Louis. On the other hand,
it had always seemed to me possible that, through hypnosis, for example,
or auto-hypnosis, by means of systematic meditation, or else by taking
the appropriate drug, I might so change my ordinary mode of consciousness
as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium,
even the mystic were talking about.