To
L. S. H.
AND
F. K. P.
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Few people, comparatively, however intelligent and generally thoughtful, have as yet stopped to consider the surpassing interest and the unique importance of Our Senses. Living gateways as the sense organs are between ourselves and our ever-changing surroundings, both spiritual and material, they constitute the channels not only of our life-satisfaction, but of all our immediate knowledge as well. If, then, in discussing them, biological imagination and breadth and depth go hand in hand with technical knowledge of the highest grade, the volumes comprised should be both human and scientific. And these volumes are so, and will be. It is because of such possibilities that a series like the present, authentic yet interesting and inexpensive, must appeal to the intelligent man or woman of to-day. As contributions to psychology and to education their value is certain to be great, as indeed is indicated by the list of their authors, whom it would be superfluous to praise or even to portray.
Small in number are the topics in all the wondrous range of the science of living things that are more alluring for their very mystery and romance than these same gateways by which we may go out into “our world” and by which this same great world may come into us and, for the little span of life, lend us a feeling of home-dwelling.
Within the past decade there has been a general popular awakening from the former uninterested attitude toward these phenomena of the physical and mental processes by which we keep in touch with the things outside ourselves. A fair knowledge of the rudiments of biology, of physiology, and of psychology now has become part of the curriculum of our schools and colleges. And of these three sciences it is psychology which has entered so deeply into our everyday life—business life as well as personal—that at last no one can escape its influence. And no one wishes to, for psychology in a sense has become the intellectual handmaiden of all who think in terms of to-day, with to-day’s amazing development of insight into the mortal meanings of our very selves, body always as well as soul. Our scientific realization of our true continuity with all things else goes on apace, and our personal relations to the boundless, perhaps Infinite, Cosmos of consciousness, life, and energy seem ever clearer. Thus, in a way, the sense organs give us personal anchorage in a Sea which else sometimes, from its very immensity and stress, would overwhelm us. Our range, although the broadest as yet vouchsafed to life, is as it were but a mere line out into the complexity of the Actual. The first step to the appreciation of this complexity and its implications for the human mind is knowledge of the conditions of its acquirement,—of the sense organs and of the perplexing brain behind them.