g and
instructive scientific information, but also because an understanding of
this fact will enable you to more clearly comprehend that which I shall
have to say to you about the higher faculties or senses.

Many of the very lowly and simple forms of animal life have this one sense
only, and that but poorly developed. The elementary life form "feels" the
touch of its food, or of other objects which may touch it. The plants also
have something akin to this sense, which in some cases, like that of the
Sensitive Plant, for instance, is quite well developed. Long before the
sense of sight, or the sensitiveness to light appeared in animal-life, we
find evidences of taste, and something like rudimentary hearing or
sensitiveness to sounds. Smell gradually developed from the sense of
taste, with which even now it is closely connected. In some forms of lower
animal life the sense of smell is much more highly developed than in
mankind. Hearing evolved in due time from the rudimentary feeling of
vibrations. Sight, the highest of the senses, came last, and was an
evolution of the elementary sensitiveness to light.

But, you see, all these senses are but modifications of the original sense
of feeling or touch. The eye records the touch or feeling of the
light-waves which strike upon it. The ear records the touch or feeling of
the sound-waves or vibrations of the air, which reach it. The tongue and
other seats of taste record the chemical touch of the particles of food,
or other substances, coming in contact with the taste-buds. The nose
records the chemical touch of the gases or fine particles of material
which touch its mucous membrane. The sensory-nerves record the presence of
outer objects coming in contact with the nerve ends in various parts of
the skin of the body. You see that all of these senses merely record the
contact or "touch" of outside objects.

But the sense organs, themselves, do not do the knowing of the presence of
the objects. They are but pieces of delicate apparatus serving to record
or to receive primary impressions from outside. Wonderful as they are,
they have their counterparts in the works of man, as for instance: the
camera, or artificial eye; the phonograph, or, artificial ear; the
delicate chemical apparatus, or artificial taster and smeller; the
telegraph, or artificial nerves. Not only this, but there are always to be
found nerve telegraph wires conveying the messages of the eye, the ear,
the nose,