The Kinæsthetic Senses

The Kinæsthetic Senses.—The muscles, tendons, and joints also give rise to perfectly definite sensations, but they have not been named as have the sensations from most of the other end-organs. Weight is the most clearly marked of these sensations. It is through the sensations connected with movements of muscles, tendons, and joints that we come to judge form, size, and distance.

The Organic Senses.—Finally, to the sensations mentioned so far must be added those which come from the internal organs of the body. From the alimentary canal we get the sensations of hunger, thirst, and nausea; from the heart, lungs, and organs of sex come numerous well-defined but unnamed sensations which play an important part in making up the feeling-tone of our daily lives.

Thus we see that the senses may be looked upon as the sentries of the body, standing at the outposts where nature and ourselves meet. They discover the qualities of the various objects with which we come in contact and hand them over to the mind in the form of sensations. And these sensations are the raw material out of which we begin to construct our material environment. Only as we are equipped with good organs of sense, especially good eyes and ears, therefore, are we able to enter fully into the wonderful world about us and receive the stimuli necessary to our thought and action.