[1971]. Cogitations

“We had sex.” A curious expression that is not known to me. I suppose I ‘had sex’ from an early stage of my life. The earliest and most primitive meaning is a sensuous one; the primitive is, by my definition, based on a background of experience gained through the senses of smell, sight, hearing, touch and taste.

According to E. D. Adrian (The Physical Background of Perception, 1947), the earliest senses are light rays and sound vibrations, “for these show what is happening at a distance”, and “intelligent behaviour is guided by them far more than by what is touching our skin” (also hair, particularly vibrissae around the snout when the eyes are defective).

Other senses, according to him, are not concerned with general policy, but “with what we are going to do next”. This involves information about “the body surface” and also tensions in muscles, temperature gradients, movements of viscera and concentrations of various substances in blood. There are “many varieties of receptor apparatus – each sensitive to particular factors in the environment.”

The developmental scale would suggest that the earlier epistemological experiences are concerned with the sense of touch. Sensuous pleasure and pain would be external contact between skin and womb; internal, between ectoderm and mesoderm and endoderm. Chemical substances in blood – poisons – would also be in contact and might contribute to a sense of being peripatetic. The contact would be extended by the sense of smell (located in the vibrissae?) and the sense of sight.

Broadly, the sense of touch would be related to ‘what to do’, the realm of transformation into action. Most of this operates autonomously without the intervention of the mind, or is transferred through education to the autonomic; for example, from desire for mobility to ‘walking’.

The distant receptors – sight, smell, vibrissae, intuition – are associated with ‘distant’ perceptors – wisdom, intelligence.