“In the beginning all the senses of man had but a small area of action, and =the lower senses were more active than the higher=. We see this among savages of the present day: smell and taste are their guides, as they are in the case of the lower animals. But when man is raised above the earth and the undergrowth, smell is no longer in command, but the eye: it has a wider kingdom, and accustoms itself from early childhood to the finest geometry of lines and colours. The ear, deeply placed beneath the projecting skull, has closer access to the inner chamber for the collection of ideas, whilst in the lower animals the ear stands upright, and in many is so formed as to point in the direction of the sound.” Smell, taste, and even touch, have but little æsthetic value as compared with the two higher senses, because in the former the material preponderates too greatly, and because they are more closely related with the pure animal impulses than are sight and hearing. Johannes Volkelt, in his valuable work “Æsthetics,” has carried on an interesting investigation of this question, and comes to the conclusion that in sight and hearing perception proceeds without any trace of the material; in touch and taste, on the other hand, the material enormously predominates, whilst smell stands between. Schiller wrote: “In the case of the eye and the ear the surrounding matter is rejected by the senses; for this reason, these two senses give the freest æsthetic enjoyment unalloyed with animal lust.” The sense of sight is a true æsthetic sense in relation to the _vita sexualis_; it is the first messenger of love. By means of this sense, colour and form become sexual stimuli: by the sense of sight the entire impression of the beloved personality is first conveyed; sympathy and sexual attraction are almost always at first dependent upon sight. In regard to love’s choice, sight is unquestionably the sense of the greatest importance. According to researches guided by the light of the modern doctrine of evolution, we can no longer doubt that the beauty of the living world is intimately connected with the sexual life, and is indeed by this first called into being. All beauty is, to use the words of Darwin and P. J. Möbius, “love become capable of perception,” and, let us ourselves add, love become capable of perception by means of the sense of sight. The figure, the carriage, the gait, the clothing, the adornment, the observation of the beauties of the various parts of the body of the beloved person--all these impressions, received by means of the sense of sight, have the most powerful erotic influence. Havelock Ellis also comes to the conclusion that for mankind the ideal of a suitable love-partner is based far more upon the =data of the sense of sight= than upon those of touch, smell, and hearing.