Perhaps this is as appropriate a place as any in which to point out that the order of the senses, on the basis of their æsthetic value, is approximately that of their philogenetic and ontogenetic development. The simplest and most undifferentiated forms of animal life possess, in more or less rudimentary form, sensitivity to impressions which must resemble closely what we know as contact, pressure, movement, and temperature. Touch, as Aristotle tells us, is the “mother sense.” Starting from this form of sensibility as a basis, the other senses develop as we ascend the animal series, by processes of increasing complexity and refinement. Taste and smell, as we know those experiences, were probably the next to differentiate themselves from the vague mass of tactual and organic sensation, then hearing, and last of all sight. And there is evidence of sequence within a single sense; thus it would appear that brightness vision, sensibility to mere light and shadow, antedated color vision by a considerable interval, and even that sensibilities to the various color impressions developed in some sort of serial order. It is also true that the sense organs upon which fall the stimulations of the physical world are, at the birth of the individual, in very diverse conditions of functional perfection. The nerves which underlie sensations of taste, touch, temperature, and pain operate perfectly at birth. Hearing is defective for one to two weeks after birth, and the mechanism of vision is still more imperfect and commonly remains so for several weeks. From the point of view of the three meanings of the word “higher,” the ethical, the æsthetic, and the genetic, the order of the senses is the same. Such close agreement cannot be entirely without significance. _The Imaginative Value of Taste_