What is the Sixth Sense

Sixth sense is extrasensory perception; the ability to sense something by means other than the five main senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, or hearing.

Sixth sense, the theory of its existence as a convenient explanation of transcendental phenomena was first put forward in the era of animal magnetism by Tardy de Montravel. He considered the sixth sense as the source and sum of all our partial senses. His contemporaries were of different opinion and explained clairvoyance and prevision by the magnetic fluid. Of late the sixth sense was given prominence as Prof. Richet's comprehensive term for the phenomena of telepathy, clairvoyance, psychometry, premonitions, predictions, crystal vision and phantasmal appearances. They are, in his view, manifestations of a new unknown sense which perceives the vibrations of reality. The conception is largely an attempt to do away with the spirit hypothesis, making its invocation unnecessary. He admits, however, that the working of this sense is incomprehensible when a choice has to be made between vibrations of reality, for instance in the case of a book test, the sensitive being called upon to read a certain line on a certain page in a certain book on the shelf which nobody opened. His main argument in favor of his theory is that the hypothesis of the sixth sense as a new physiological notion contradicts nothing that we learn from physiology, whereas the spirit hypothesis does.