(4) Why should the thing “at the other end of the nerve” remain unknown and unknowable?  Since the nerve is entirely in the mind, is purely a mental construct, can anything whatever be at the end of it without being in the mind?  And if the thing in question is not in the mind, how are we going to prove that it is any nearer to one end of a nerve which is inside the mind than it is to the other?  If it may really be said to be at the end of the nerve, why may we not know it quite as well as we do the end of the nerve, or any other mental construct?

It must be clear to the careful reader of Professor Pearson’s paragraphs, that he does not confine himself strictly to the world of mere “projections,” to an outer world which is really inner.  If he did this, the distinction between inner and outer would disappear.  Let us consider for a moment the imprisoned clerk.  He is in a telephone exchange, about him are wires and subscribers.  He gets only sounds and must build up his whole universe of things out of sounds.  Now we are supposing him to be in a telephone exchange, to be receiving messages, to be building up a world out of these messages.  Do we for a moment think of him as building up, out of the messages which came along the wires, those identical wires which carried the messages and the subscribers which sent them?  Never! we distinguish between the exchange, with its wires and subscribers, and the messages received and worked up into a world.  In picturing to ourselves the telephone exchange, we are doing what the plain man and the psychologist do when they distinguish between mind and body,—­they never suppose that the messages which come through the senses are identical with the senses through which they come.

But suppose we maintain that there is no such thing as a telephone exchange, with its wires and subscribers, which is not to be found within some clerk.  Suppose the real external world is something inner and only “projected” without, mistakenly supposed by the unthinking to be without.  Suppose it is nonsense to speak of a wire which is not in the mind of a clerk.  May we under such circumstances describe any clerk as in a telephone exchange? as receiving messages? as no nearer to his subscribers than his end of the wire?  May we say that sense-impressions come flowing in to him?  The whole figure of the telephone exchange becomes an absurdity when we have once placed the exchange within the clerk.  Nor can we think of two clerks as connected by a wire, when it is affirmed that every wire must “really” be in some clerk.

The truth is, that, in the extracts which I have given above and in many other passages in the same volume, the real external world, the world which does not exist in the mind but without it, is much discredited, and is yet not actually discarded.  The ego is placed at the brain terminals of the sensory nerves, and it receives messages which flow in; i.e. the clerk is actually placed in an exchange.  That the existence of the exchange is afterward denied in so many words does not mean that it has not played and does not continue to play an important part in the thought of the author.