Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/79

 is owing to individual education, or is the result of slow and continuous 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 instruments seem possible only through slow methods of development. If a sixth sense should confer upon us with our present range of faculties 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 clairvoyance 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 phenomena evade verification or reduction to a consistent law of action. Men have been learning for the past five thousand years or more that physical or mental work and obedience to natural law increase the force and effectiveness of the individual and of his descendants. The geological 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 illustration, the sum of the angles of a triangle should equal two right angles. And it is probable that a finer and higher grade of perceptions 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 perceptions 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