The time–factor in the appropriation of works and intellectual traditions is not, certainly, the only reason why ideas may elude their original spokesmen and eventually thwart the intentions of those who did their best to make them public. The commerce between minds belonging to the same generation is also liable to go astray, giving rise to peculiar outcomes (‘externalities’) in the transmission of ideas. As it will be seen in this chapter, the ‘entropy of information’ – the tendency of messages to gradually lose their original content and dissipate as they are transmitted from one person to the next – has been the subject of detailed research in modern experimental psychology.

As Francis Bacon had already noticed early in the seventeenth century (his own experience as an author no doubt contributing to the conclusion), ‘it is not a thing so easy as is conceived to convey the conceit of one man's mind into the mind of another without loss or mistaking, specially in notions new and differing from those that are received’. The transmission of ideas through language is usually accompanied by a certain loss or dissipation of the information they contain. In a very few cases (e.g. in the example which opens chapter 8), it is true, authors do come to believe that the content of their work has been enhanced, even in their own eyes, by a particularly careful and empathetic reader.