But again one must question, on general idealistic principles, whether there be in such cases any real distinction between symbolism and reality,--between subjective and objective as we commonly use those terms. The resisting matter which we see and touch has "solid" reality for minds so constituted as to have the same subjective feeling awakened by it. But to other minds, endowed with other forms of sensibility--minds possibly both higher and more numerous than our own--this solid matter may seem disputable and unreal, while thought and emotion, perceived in ways unknown to us, may be the only reality. This material world constitutes, in fact, a "privileged case"--a simplified example--among all discernible worlds, so far as the perception of incarnate spirits is concerned. For discarnate spirits it is no longer a privileged case; to _them_ it is apparently easier to discern thoughts and emotions by non-material signs.[116] But they need not therefore be wholly cut off from discerning material things, any more than incarnate spirits are wholly cut off from discerning immaterial things--thoughts and emotions symbolised in phantasmal form. "The ghost in man, the ghost that once was man," to use Tennyson's words, have each of them to overcome by empirical artifices certain difficulties which are of different type for each, but are not insurmountable by either. These reflections, applicable at various points in our argument, have seemed specially needed when we had first to attack the meaning of the so-called "travelling clairvoyance," of which instances were given in the chapter on hypnotism. It was needful to consider how far there was a continuous transition between these excursions and directer transferences between mind and mind,--between telæsthesia and telepathy. It now seems to me that such a continuous transition may well exist, and that there is no absolute gulf between the supernormal perception of ideas as existing in other minds, and the supernormal perception of what we know as matter. All matter may, for aught we know, exist as an idea in some cosmic mind, with which mind each individual spirit may be in relation, as fully as with individual minds. The difference perhaps lies rather in the fact that there may be generally a _summons_ from a cognate mind which starts the so-called agent's mind into action; his invasion may be in some way _invited_; while a spiritual excursion among inanimate objects only may often lack an impulse to start it. If this be so, it would explain the fact that such excursions have mainly succeeded under the influence of hypnotic suggestion.