Ckwnfo, the Super-sense 



sciousness in a tree or a blade of grass ? That is 

 too much to assert, though one may think or 

 believe so. No man can answer the question 

 which occurs so constantly to one who lives among 

 growing things; but you can hardly leave your 

 simple experiment without formulating a theory 

 that even the hidden rootlets of a rose-bush have 

 something fundamentally akin to our highly de- 

 veloped sensibility. At present some biologists 

 are beginning to assert, and confidently, though it 

 is but an opinion, that there is no dead matter in 

 the world; that the ultimate particles of which 

 matter is composed are all intensely alive. And if 

 alive, they must be sentient; that is, each must 

 have an infinitesimal degree of feeling or sense 

 perception. 



To return from our speculation, and to illustrate 

 the chumfo faculty from human and animal ex- 

 perience: I was once sitting idly on a Nantucket 

 wharf, alternately watching some hermit-crabs 

 scurrying about in their erratic fashion under the 

 tide, and an old dog that lay soaking himself in 

 the warm sunshine. Just behind us, the only in- 

 harmonious creatures in the peaceful scene, some 

 laborers were unloading rocks from a barge by the 

 aid of a derrick. For more than an hour, or ever 

 since I came to the wharf, the dog lay in the same 



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