17. They dislike speaking aloud because it is a physical process. So, when there were no spirits to act as intermediaries, I was only able to talk with them by a kind of thought activation. Their memory, being of ideas, not of purely material pictures, presents these more directly to their thinking. For thinking above the pictorial level needs abstract ideas as its object. For all this the spirits of Mercury are not particularly distinguished for their powers of judgment. They take no pleasure in matters requiring judgment or in inferences from known facts. It is the bare facts that give them pleasure.