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 of wires, so ours is conditioned by our nervous system, by our