"And indeed what possible purpose would be served by this illegal
and unnatural excess of approximation which you call TOUCHING,
when all the ends of so brutal and course a process are attained
at once more easily and more exactly by the sense of hearing?
As to your suggested danger of deception, it is non-existent:
for the Voice, being the essence of one's Being, cannot be
thus changed at will. But come, suppose that I had the power
of passing through solid things, so that I could penetrate my subjects,
one after another, even to the number of a billion, verifying the size
and distance of each by the sense of FEELING: How much time and energy
would be wasted in this clumsy and inaccurate method! Whereas now,
in one moment of audition, I take as it were the census and statistics,
local, corporeal, mental and spiritual, of every living being in Lineland.
Hark, only hark!"
So saying he paused and listened, as if in an ecstasy, to a sound
which seemed to me no better than a tiny chirping from an innumerable
multitude of lilliputian grasshoppers.
"Truly," replied I, "your sense of hearing serves you in good stead,
and fills up many of your deficiencies.
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