cturing 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.

It is interesting to see how a man of science, whose reflections compel
him to deny the existence of the external world that we all seem to
perceive and that we somehow recognize as distinct from anything in our
minds, is _nevertheless compelled to admit the existence of this world
at every turn_.

But if we do admit it, what shall we make of it? Shall we deny the
truth of what the psychologist has to tell us about a knowledge of
things only through the sensations to which they give rise? We cannot,
surely, do that. Shall we affirm that we know the external world
directly, and at the same time that we do not know it directly, but
only indirectly, and through the images which arise in our minds? That
seems inconsistent. Certainly ther