What are the five senses, anyway.  Your first answer will be:  “Feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling.”  But that is merely a recital of the different forms of sensing.  What is a “sense,” when you get right down to it?  Well, you will find that the dictionary tells us that a sense is a “faculty, possessed by animals, of perceiving external objects by means of impressions made upon certain organs of the body.”  Getting right down to the roots of the matter, we find that the five senses of man are the channels through which he becomes aware or conscious of information concerning objects outside of himself.  But, these senses are not the sense-organs alone.  Back of the organs there is a peculiar arrangement of the nervous system, or brain centres, which take up the messages received through the organs; and back of this, again, is the ego, or soul, or mind, which, at the last, is the real Knower.  The eye is merely a camera; the ear, merely a receiver of sound-waves; the nose, merely an arrangement of sensitive mucous membrane; the mouth and tongue, simply a container of taste-buds; the nervous system, merely a sensitive apparatus designed to transmit messages to the brain and other centres—­all being but part of the physical machinery, and liable to impairment or destruction.  Back of all this apparatus is the real Knower who makes use of it.

Science tells us that of all the five senses, that of Touch or Feeling was the original—­the fundamental sense.  All the rest are held to be but modifications of, and specialized forms of, this original sense of feeling.  I am telling you this not merely in the way of interesting 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.