THE EVOLUTION OF A NEW SENSE. 69 



is owing to individual education, or is the result of slow and contin- 

 uous physiological evolution during thousands of years. Owing to 

 lack of evidence the question seems at present unanswerable. But it 

 is obvious that our present senses might reveal more to us, because we 

 are inferior to many animals in detecting objects by smell, hearing, or 

 sight. Our comparative dullness is apparently due to the fact that 

 there is with us no incessantly impending danger, and in consequence 

 some of these senses are not as often excited. 



It is unquestionably our wish that we could have greater powers 

 of discernment. The telegraph and printing-press are indications of 

 this longing for a wider life. Science has taught us that we perceive 

 only an infinitesimal part of the objective world and of its processes. 

 The theoretical addition of another sense does not satisfy us. It 

 would seem only a new working- wheel of the mechanism. In fact, 

 greatly magnified powers of perception without the assistance of in- 

 struments seem possible only through slow methods of development. 

 If a sixth sense should confer upon us with our present range of fac- 

 ulties the power to be everywhere at once, we would be reduced to a 

 state of confusion equivalent to the nullification of consciousness. The 

 attempt to conceive it results in absurd contradictions. It is precisely 

 this condition of omnipresence which is vaguely imagined as possible 

 in clairvoyance. One of the difficulties in regard to accepting clair- 

 voyance as an indication of a sixth sense is that the effect arises from 

 a diseased condition of the sensibility. The result is unaccountable, 

 but at the same time unwholesome. It is at variance with the steadily 

 increasing scientific knowledge of our day in the fact that its phenom- 

 ena evade verification or reduction to a consistent law of action. Men 

 have been learning for the past five thousand years or more that phys- 

 ical or mental work and obedience to natural law increase the force 

 and effectiveness of the individual and of his descendants. The geo- 

 logical discoveries of Huxley and Marsh, and the development of the 

 simplest forms of vegetable life, denote an irresistible evolutionary 

 sequence or working power in nature. It seems as necessary that 

 those animals with the greatest power of adaptation should survive 

 and express the later result, as that, to use Spinoza's geometrical illus- 

 tration, the sum of the angles of a triangle should equal two right 

 angles. And it is probable that a finer and higher grade of percep- 

 tions would not be altogether through the physiological development 

 of our present senses, because such senses imply an inevitable relation 

 or result from the action of the outer world ; but many such percep- 

 tions would be due to a greater command of material potencies — such 

 as that outlined in the possible extension of knowledge through the 

 telephone, the phonograph, or the liquefaction of all the gases. 



Among the many singular and original ideas attributed to Edgar 

 A. Poe, was one to the effect that during a silence of about twenty 

 minutes it is possible to know an intimate friend's line of thought as 



