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.