If this be the case, it seems likely that central perception will shape itself on the types of perception to which the central tracts of the brain are accustomed; and that the _connaissance supérieure_, the telæsthetic knowledge, however it may really be acquired, will present itself mainly as clairvoyance or clairaudience--as some form of sight or sound. Yet these telæsthetic sights and sounds may be expected to show some trace of their unusual origin. They may, for instance, be _imperfectly co-ordinated_ with sights and sounds arriving through external channels; and, since they must in some way be a translation of supernormal impressions into sensory terms, they are likely to show something _symbolic_ in character. This tendency to subliminal symbolism, indeed, meets us at each point of our inquiry. As an instance of it in its simplest form, I may mention a case where a botanical student passing inattentively in front of the glass door of a restaurant thought that he had seen _Verbascum Thapsus_ printed thereon. The real word was _Bouillon_; and that happens to be the trivial name in French for the plant Verbascum Thapsus. The actual optical perception had thus been subliminally transformed; the words Verbascum Thapsus were the report to the inattentive supraliminal self by a subliminal self more interested in botany than in dinner. Nay, we know that our own optical perception is in its own way highly symbolic. The scene which the baby sees instinctively,--which the impressionist painter manages to see by a sort of deliberate self-simplification,--is very different from the highly elaborate interpretation and selection of blotches of colour by which the ordinary adult figures to himself the visible world. Now we adults stand towards this subliminal symbolism in much the same attitude as the baby stands towards our educated optical symbolism. Just as the baby fails to grasp the third dimension, so may we still be failing to grasp a fourth;--or whatever be the law of that higher cognisance which begins to report fragmentarily to man that which his ordinary senses cannot discern. Assuredly then we must not take the fact that any knowledge comes to us symbolically as a proof that it comes to us from a mind outside our own. The symbolism may be the inevitable language in which one stratum of our personality makes its report to another. The symbolism, in short, may be either the easiest, or the only possible psychical record of actual objective fact; whether that fact be in the first instance discerned by our deeper selves, or be conveyed to us from other minds in this form;--elaborated for our mind's digestion, as animal food has been elaborated for our body's digestion, from a primitive crudity of things.