“But the reader, perhaps, remarks, ’I not only see an object, but I can touch it.  I can trace the nerve from the tip of my finger to the brain.  I am not like the telephone clerk, I can follow my network of wires to their terminals and find what is at the other end of them.’  Can you, reader?  Think for a moment whether your ego has for one moment got away from his brain exchange.  The sense-impression that you call touch was just as much as sight felt only at the brain end of a sensory nerve.  What has told you also of the nerve from the tip of your finger to your brain?  Why, sense-impressions also, messages conveyed along optic or tactile sensory nerves.  In truth, all you have been doing is to employ one subscriber to your telephone exchange to tell you about the wire that goes to a second, but you are just as far as ever from tracing out for yourself the telephone wires to the individual subscriber and ascertaining what his nature is in and for himself.  The immediate sense-impression is just as far removed from what you term the ‘outside world’ as the store of impresses.  If our telephone clerk had recorded by aid of a phonograph certain of the messages from the outside world on past occasions, then if any telephonic message on its receipt set several phonographs repeating past messages, we have an image analogous to what goes on in the brain.  Both telephone and phonograph are equally removed from what the clerk might call the ‘real outside world,’ but they enable him through their sounds to construct a universe; he projects those sounds, which are really inside his office, outside his office, and speaks of them as the external universe.  This outside world is constructed by him from the contents of the inside sounds, which differ as widely from things-in-themselves as language, the symbol, must always differ from the thing it symbolizes.  For our telephone clerk sounds would be the real world, and yet we can see how conditioned and limited it would be by the range of his particular telephone subscribers and by the contents of their messages.

“So it is with our brain; the sounds from telephone and phonograph correspond to immediate and stored sense-impressions.  These sense-impressions we project as it were outwards and term the real world outside ourselves.  But the things-in-themselves which the sense-impressions symbolize, the ‘reality,’ as the metaphysicians wish to call it, at the other end of the nerve, remains unknown and is unknowable.  Reality of the external world lies for science and for us in combinations of form and color and touch—­sense-impressions as widely divergent from the thing ‘at the other end of the nerve’ as the sound of the telephone from the subscriber at the other end of the wire.  We are cribbed and confined in this world of sense-impressions like the exchange clerk in his world of sounds, and not a step beyond can we get.  As his world is conditioned and limited by his particular network