SELF 219 



ment, and that is consciousness. It is not so very sur- 

 prising then that Helen Keller, born with normal sense 

 organs, and therefore having a complete human brain, 

 and long after birth losing the use of the sense organs 

 of sight and hearing, should acquire, through touch 

 alone, such a marvelous knowledge of objectivity. A 

 knowledge of everything she was enabled to handle is 

 possible to her. Touch is the sensibility to pressure, 

 weight, muscular resistance, the sense of feeling, includ- 

 ing the sensibility to temperature. The sense of sight 

 is educated to the vicarious perception of form, and 

 perhaps all the qualities of matter, except color, by the 

 sense of touch. The marvelous arrangements through- 

 out the human body for making the sense of touch so 

 extremely acute, show how important natural experi- 

 ence, and natural selection have considered the evolu- 

 tion of this all pervasive sense is, to the welfare of the 

 human organism. Not only is this so in the specializa- 

 tion of the sense of touch into the four other sense 

 organs sight, hearing, smelling and tasting but in 

 evolving in certain papillae of the skin small tactile 

 corpuscles 1/300 of an inch long and 1/800 of an inch 

 thick composed of connective tissue, and supplied with 

 one or more nerve fibres, which are branched and con- 

 voluted within the corpuscle. Remembering that, every 

 point of the periphery of the body, and every point of 

 the inside of the body, is the location of the arborescent 

 receptive end of a nerve, which runs to some ganglionic 

 center, which is also connected with the brain, we can 

 see how completely the sense of touch is the corre- 

 spondence of the individual with objectivity, and there- 

 fore is consciousness. 



WHAT Is CONSCIOUSNESS. It is said above, the psy- 

 chologists differ in regard to the nature of " conscious- 



