Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/782

762 Returning to the human body, we find that very little has been said about the relation of the senses to each other, the order of their development in the evolution of the race, or the present tendency of their relative development. The theory proposed by Democritus, that all our senses have been evolved from the sense of touch, seems likely to be established by biological studies. But it may be more accurate to say that all the senses are specialized forms of a primordial sense, which may have been less like our sense of touch than that of sight. In this connection one recalls, and with somewhat less skepticism, certain recent experiments of the French investigators in abnormal psychology, showing that hypnotized subjects see and hear with their finger-tips. With the growth of intelligence, there has been a steadily increasing use of the two senses which give us the finest discriminations and the widest knowledge of our surroundings, viz., the senses of sight and hearing. When each animal was obliged to search for and select his own food largely by smell and taste, the latter senses were no doubt the best developed. For tones, colors, and form these animals had little care. They thought, as far as they thought at all, in images of taste and smell, as we think in images of sight and hearing. Many animals now are smell-minded, and in the thoughts and dreams of dogs and deer we may suppose that images of odors are as prominent as visual images are in our own. In man the crude organs of taste and smell have given place to the delicate eye and ear, both as avenues of knowledge and as sources of higher pleasures. What is true of taste and smell is true also of touch. Not confusing this with the muscular sense, the information we get from the sense of touch is small and the pleasure less. That this sense is capable of such remarkable improvement in the case of the blind is evidence only of its once greater use.

It is not now my purpose, however, to compare the senses of sight and hearing with the lower senses, but with each other. It is, perhaps, not realized by many that there are certain new conditions in modern life and certain innovations in our system of education that are bringing the eye into unprecedented importance in comparison with the ear and the other organs of sense; that this greater relative use of the sense of sight will result in its greater development, while the lessened use of the sense of hearing will lead to its deterioration. Such a result would not only threaten several noble fine arts connected with the ear, and incidentally weaken the memory, but would also effect an important change in man's personality. I will try to point out the