person asking the questions, and partly on how the questions are phrased. If the witness thinks the advocate is honest and to be trusted, he will tend to be more forthcoming; if he thinks the advocate is a twister, he will tend to be more reticent. What perhaps is not realised quite so clearly is that if the advocate wants to get the maximum response out of a witness, he must try to suppress his own personality entirely and be an anonymous advocate; or to put it another way, in advocacy there is no room for egotism; it only spoils one's own performance, and also the witness's performance when he is giving evidence.
Now all this is simply designed to illustrate, by using the rigid setting of the law courts as an example, what everyone knows anyway, namely that human beings react to one another. How often does one say to oneself, even if not aloud, “He is not my type of man (or woman)”; and by that phrase one means that one feels no sympathy for him (or her). Or again one may say of two people, “Yes they are hand in glove”; one means that they are working together with conspiratorial understanding, and one implies that they are birds of a feather and have the same mental make-up. They may not view things from exactly the same viewpoint, but they have the same kind of consciousness. Assessing the type of consciousness a person has is in fact a very common exercise in the world of affairs; and at an even more elementary level it is the basic qualification of friendship that most of us demand from childhood onwards. We may express our liking for a friend by saying that we have a number of interests in common; but what in fact has drawn him to you is that you both can share a common consciousness, whilst approaching things from different points of view. The interests in common are the things which give mutual enjoyment; but the capacity for mutual enjoyment is engendered by the common consciousness.
What I am urging is that the idea that changes in consciousness affect our…