olution of the
emotions from physiological pleasure and pain, contact plays an
important part in connection with functional satisfaction or
dissatisfaction with the environment.

In the next place, there are the facts, first, that an element of
thought inheres in all sensation, while sensation conditions thought;
and secondly, that there is a close connection of all the senses, both
in origin--each of them being a modification of the one primary sense of
touch--and in subsequent development, where the specialized organs are
still co-ordinated through tactile sensation, in the sensitive surface
of organism. Again, and here we see the genesis of ideas of contact, it
is by means of the tactile sensibility of the skin and membranes of
sense-organs, forming a sensitized as well as a protecting surface, that
the nervous system conveys to the brain information about the external
world, and this information is in its original aspect the response to
impact. Primitive physics, no less than modern, recognizes that contact
is a modified form of a blow. These considerations show that contact not
only plays an important part in the life of the soul but must have had a
profound influence on the development of ideas, and it may now be
assumed that ideas of contact have been a universal and original
constant factor in human relations and that they are so still. The
latter assumption is to be stressed, because we find that the ideas
which lie beneath primitive taboo are still a vital part of human
nature, though mostly emptied of their religious content; and also
because, as I hold, ceremonies and etiquette, such as still obtain,
could not possess such vitality as they do unless there were a living
psychological force behind them, such as we find in elementary ideas
which come straight from functional processes.

These ideas of contact are _primitive_ in each sense of the word, at
whatever stage of culture they appear. They seem to go back in origin
and in character to that highly developed sensibility of all animal and
even organized life, which forms at once a biological monitor and a
safeguard for the whole organism in relation to its environment. From
this sensibility there arise subjective ideas concerning the safety or
danger of the environment, and in man we may suppose these subjective
ideas as to his environment, and especially as to his fellow-men, to be
the origin of his various expressions of avoidance or desire for
contact