THE words "sense," "senses," and "sensation" are used so often by Mary Baker Eddy in explaining the teachings of Christian Science that it behooves every student of this Science to ponder well their thought value, and to utilize them correctly. The word "sense," used by this author only as a noun, is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as "any of the special bodily faculties by which sensation is roused (the five senses, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch . . .)." "Sensation" is defined as "consciousness of perceiving or seeming to perceive some state ... of one's body ... or of one's mind. . . ."
The close relatedness between material life and the physical senses and sensation is apparent. They are coincident and inseparable. The physical faculties, or senses, are essential to a normal human existence. But a very different kind of sense is indispensable if one's human life experience is to be constructive and worth while. A criminal may have normal physical faculties; so may the slave of false appetite, the liar and cheat, and the troublemaker in homes and in society. If even mortal existence is to be fairly normal, there must be actively present in individual thought a moral sense to which human consciousness, made up largely of what is physically seen, heard, and felt, is subservient. The individual must be able to separate between right and wrong, to cling to the former and reject the latter.
The physical senses are wholly unable to provide men with any knowledge of God, of God's universe, or of God's man. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, . . . the things which God hath prepared."
