ourselves. On the
other hand, although if a sensory nerve be divided anywhere short of
the brain, we lose the corresponding class of sense impression, we yet
speak of many sense-impressions, such as form and texture, as existing
outside ourselves. How close then can we actually get to this supposed
world outside ourselves? Just as near but no nearer than the brain
terminals of the sensory nerves. We are like the clerk in the central
telephone exchange who cannot get nearer to his customers than his end
of the telephone wires. We are indeed worse off than the clerk, for to
carry out the analogy properly we must suppose him _never to have been
outside the telephone exchange, never to have seen a customer or any
one like a customer--in short, never, except through the telephone
wire, to have come in contact with the outside universe_. Of that
'real' universe outside himself he would be able to form no direct
impression; the real universe for him would be the aggregate of his
constructs from the messages which were caused by the telephone wires
in his office. About those messages and the ideas raised in his mind
by them he might reason and draw his inferences; and his conclusions
would be correct--for what? For the world of telephonic messages, for
the type of messages that go through the telephone. Something definite
and valuable he might know with regard to the spheres of action and of
thought of his telephonic subscribers, but outside those spheres he
could have no experience. Pent up in his office he could never have
seen or touched even a telephonic subscriber _in himself_. Very much
in the position of such a telephone clerk is the conscious _ego_ of
each one of us seated at the brain terminals of the sensory nerves.
Not a step nearer than those terminals can the _ego_ get to the 'outer
world,' and what in and for themselves are the subscribers to its nerve
exchange it has no means of ascertaining. Messages in the form of
sense-impressions come flowing in from that 'outside world,' and these
we analyze, classify, store up, and reason about. But of the nature of
'things-in-themselves,' of what may exist at the other end of our
system of telephone wires, we know nothing at all.

"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 termina