The Sixth Sense: Its Cultivation and Use

by Charles Henry Brent

The most alert and indispensable of endowments, it is at once sociable with the remainder of man’s faculties, external and internal, and jealously independent of them saving of human consciousness alone. In its higher stages of development it accepts suggestions from all, dictation from none. Its manner is courteous and its mode of approach one of promptings and hints. The sphere of every other faculty is its sphere where it is content to play the modest part of a handmaiden, never usurping functions already provided for, although it has a sphere of its own whither not even reason can follow. It is supplementary to all, contradictory to none. Without its exercise there can be no progress or growth. It has its origin in a groping instinct, its final development in orderly activities capable of increasingly clear classification. Body, intellect, character, moral and religious, are under its influence and dependent upon its beneficent operations. It plays upon the body, contributing to its health and efficiency; it gives wings to the intellect, making it creative and productive, capable of formulating hypotheses and venturing upon speculation; it converts the seemingly impossible into the normal, bringing moral ideals within reach of the will, without which improvement in character would be a matter of chance; it unfolds the Divine to the human and forms a nexus between here and beyond, now and to-morrow, finite and infinite, God and man. It looks not only up but down, making the nature outside of us intelligible to the nature inside of us and friendly with it. If it peoples the stars, it also makes a universe of the atom. It is mysterious, recollective, emotional, intuitive, speculative, imaginative, prophetic, minatory, expectant, penetrative. As it moves up or down with equal freedom, so it reaches backward or forward, is attached or detached at will, in its operations.

The Sixth Sense, or, to be more accurate, the second group of senses, has its specialized functions, difficult as it is to analyze with accuracy this most spiritual endowment of human personality, the inner gift of touch. It has specializations parallel to those of the bodily senses. Sight, hearing and testing are its functions. So clear eyed is it that it can see with the nicety of an eye aided by the microscope, so sensitive to voices that the lowest whispers impart a message, so critical as to test values with a precision and swiftness that surpass the taste and smell which tell us what is sweet and what unsavory.

If it be argued that I am but dilating on certain aspects of mind, I am not concerned to deny that all may be comprehended under that convenient blanket-word. But they are as distinct from the rationalizing media as from the will.

The nearest approach to a satisfactory substitute for the term “mystic sense” in terms of the reason is “conceptual reason.” It furnishes us with the thought of a faculty which has procreative or generative properties capable of being fertilized by intercourse with that which is separate from and higher than itself. Its first activity is to lay itself over against that which, though partaking of its own nature, is not itself. It is not self-fertilizing and can conceive or beget only after having perceived and apprehended.[1] It has constant regard for an objective and communication with it.

The operation of the Mystic Sense is summed up in the single word faith, which is described as the giving substance to that which is hoped for, the testing of things not seen.[2] There is no objection to letting the world faith cover the whole working of the Mystic Sense, provided it is not restricted to a severely religious meaning. It is thus that it is commonly understood, or at any rate when applied in other connections it is assumed to be the working of a different faculty from that exercised in the sphere of religion. In its distinctively religious meaning, faith is the operation of the Mystic Sense in its highest employment. There is no one faculty that is reserved exclusively for religious employment. The fact is that religious faith is no more separate from the processes of the Mystic Sense which appropriate health for the body, hypotheses for the mind, working principles for the man of action, and ideals for the character, or independent of them, than the act of physical perception, which enables us to touch the stars, is separate from that use of the sensory nerves which relates us to the book we handle, or independent of it. They are both the result of a single faculty, or group of faculties, operating in different altitudes. Faith will be accepted in these pages as a philosophic term. Thus we speak of scientific faith, moral faith, and religious faith with equal appropriateness, meaning the Mystic Sense operating respectively in the interests of the scientific, of the moral, and of the religious.

The Mystic Sense has for its workshop the uplands of life in the rarefied atmosphere of ideas and ideals. It is at once a super-sense giving us a bird’s-eye view of the universe which is not permitted at close quarters, and a sub-sense bringing before our attention the contents hidden beneath the surface of things. There are not two worlds, objective and subjective respectively, but two aspects of one world—things as they are in their absolute and ultimate being, and things as they are relatively or as apprehended by our cognitive powers. Our conception of the truth is a distortion or falls short of the truth, and it is our aspiration to bring about such a coincidence as will make the relation of subject to object perfect. We draw the thing as we see it for the God of things as they are now, not to-morrow only, the sole difference being that to-morrow our painting will be truer to the original and consequently more artistic than now. All objective is immediately reduced by man, by subconscious or conscious process, into subjective, so that we may for the sake of convenience talk of subjective and objective phases of reality, the subjective being human, partial, progressive, the objective being divine, absolute, and final.

There is an objective physical world and an objective psychic or spiritual world, the latter being immanent in the former, though not limited by it, so that every material object has spiritual contents. The spiritual is no more an inside without an outside than the physical is an outside without an inside. Each has its phase of reality, though in the ultimate analysis the physical is dependent for its value upon its spiritual capacity. The physical has a non-sensible inside which to be discerned calls for distinctively human as distinguished from mere animal powers of perception. Dimly in animal life there is a recognition of inner character in objects—hostility, affinity, nourishment and the like are instinctively sensed; but here deep perception stops except where, by reason of what is called domestication or association with man, certain human characteristics are faintly imaged in dog or horse.

There is no antagonism between the physical and the spiritual. The physical world is to man a medium through which phases of the spiritual are reached. The only antagonism there can be is that which arises by an attempt to use the material without regard for its full spiritual contents or inside. Were not the physical universe a sacrament it would be a phantasm. If man divorces the inside from the outside with a view to gratifying his physical senses he abdicates his character as a man to become an animal; if to feed anything less than his entire selfhood, he presents the spectacle of arrested development. The bodily senses alone can get at the full content, the deep inside of nothing, no matter how pronounced its objectivity, “The truly real is a thing that has an inside.”[3] The more pronounced or attractive the external substance and form of a material object and the closer we are to it, the greater the difficulty for the average character to gain cognition of its spiritual essence. “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of God.”[4] Even those who place an undue valuation upon the material, whether possessed of wealth or not, have a like difficulty in penetrating into the internal realm which lies beneath and around as well as above and within the external.[5] It is absurd for men to expect to sense the spiritual except with spiritual faculties. The physical world is perceived by a sensory apparatus of the same substance as that of the physical world; the spiritual world is perceived by a sensory apparatus of the same substance as that of the spiritual world. There must be an inherent affinity between the thing apprehended and the organ apprehending. Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them because they are spiritually proved.[6]

Reality is a term too often confined to that which can be expressed in terms of bodily senses; whereas it is that which has existence in heaven above, in the earth beneath, and in the waters under the earth, and which, apart from human perception, though in a minimum degree or passively, plays upon and affects man and his universe, but which reaches its highest potentiality manward when, by the volitional operation of human faculties it is subjectively apprehended and finds permanent place in his consciousness. Reality is that which supports and feeds the subconscious life by the pressure of its mere existence or laws of being, but which is capable of bestowing larger gifts in proportion to the degree in which it receives conscious admission into the activities of personal experience. It is a law of spiritual or psychic, as well as of physical, existence that every part is related to every other part and influenced by it through either attraction or energy. In the case of inanimate matter mere spacial propinquity or distance determines the measure of attraction or energy of object upon object, but where sentient beings are concerned the reaction of conscious volition on environment is the determining factor regulating the degree of influence released.