The lowest organisms come in contact with things, have objective relations of contact, but it is quite unlikely that the earliest psychic life feels contacts, really touches things. From the objective commerce with things pleasures and pains are realized, but object is unsensed and unknown. The simplest marine forms are incessantly feeding at hazard at the prompting of a subjective lack-pain. That the lowest life is born into a nutritive medium and that at birth many later organisms are incased or in direct connection with nutritive material, shows that at the very beginning psychic life is not needed as discriminatory, but as simple subjective pain and pleasure moving to undirected activities. However, such perfect environment being rare and temporary, in its blind and senseless activity the organism is often trying to assimilate the unassimilable, or the harmful, and is often appropriating when there is no substance present. It would obviously be of great advantage if it could touch its food, have sensation as guide to activity. Thus realization of a very limited world of things arises in touch achieved during the feeding act. That which satisfies and gives pleasure is by touch discriminated from that which does not give these results. Discrimination of soft and hard is probably the earliest touch impression. The soft thing is manipulated in the feeding act as edible. But a great step is made when psychical effect of the edible is not only comprehended through touch in direct connection with the assimilatory act, but antecedently thereto. The animal establishes a connection between the feeling the soft thing and pleasure experience in its struggling activities. It touches more and more readily what it is assimilating, and thence rejects more easily and promptly the injurious. In appropriative effort with pleasure experience it feels the thing, cognizes in most general way its physical quality. As sensitiveness increases through struggle and natural selection the assimilatory attempt will be more and more quickly met by the touch sensation, until touch ultimately becomes precedent and actually directive to food. Recognition, in a far more emphatic way than before, becomes added to cognition; the thing is not merely known in its bare objectivity, but is recognised, identified, and has a meaning. Touch must give, not only the thing, but the thing as potent for some quality not now being appreciated, though formerly appreciated _pari passu_ with the touching. The interpretative act comes through the association gradually established in past experiences, so that the edible is no longer fortuitously hit upon, but touch precedes active effort at appropriation, and suggests by itself edibility or non-edibility. Thus is action greatly economized and made certain. Definite feelers, extending from the body, and sometimes quite long, are evolved, and the first period in the history of knowledge, the age of touch, is inaugurated.