y the Super-sense 



how alive he is, and h'ow much better he can 

 hear and smell than ever he dreamed. At such 

 a time one's whole body seems to become a deli- 

 cately poised instrument for receiving sense im- 

 pressions, and one's skin especially begins to tingle 

 and creep as it wakes from its long sleep. Nor is 

 this "creeping" of the skin strange or queer, as 

 we assume, but perfectly natural. The sensations 

 which we now ignorantly associate with fear of the 

 dark (a late and purely human development; the 

 animal knows it not) are in reality the sensations 

 of awakening life. 



Possibly we may explain this supersensitiveness 

 of the skin, when life awakens in it once more and 

 it becomes for us another and finer instrument of 

 perception, by the simple biological fact that every 

 cell of the multitudes which make up the human 

 body has a more or less complete organization 

 within itself. Moreover, as late experiments have 

 shown, a cell or a tissue of cells will live and pros- 

 per in a suitable environment when completely 

 separated from the body of which it was once a 

 part. These human cells inherit certain charac- 

 teristics common to all animal cells since life 

 began; and it is not improbable that they inherit 

 also something of the primal cell's sensibility, or 

 capacity to receive impressions from the external 

 world. This universal cell-function was largely 



[65! 



