Our senses series

The Sense of Taste

The sense of taste is in numerous ways the most paradoxical of all the senses. Although, as a source of sense impression, it can afford the keenest immediate feelings of pleasure and delight, the books on sthetics and art have little or nothing to say about it. Skill in the compounding of tastes and flavors, or discrimination in their relish, brings the expert neither artistic recognition nor social eminence. Taste, it is constantly asserted, is one of the lower senses, and neither in the enjoyment of it nor the ministration to it is there to be acquired the merit and general esteem that readily distinguish an art from a service. Nevertheless we commonly use the word taste for the expression of just those qualities of fine discrimination and delicate perception which are most conspicuously the marks of sthetic appreciation. In our choice of figures of speech we reserve vision for the impersonal and remote intuition of the seer and the philosopher. Touch we use to express such intimate and personal impressions as sympathy and pity. xivSound seems best to indicate, through noise or tone, either the self-seeking clamor of aggression or the mere passive possession of a certain richness of quality. Odor, in its most common figurative use, suggests the reprehensible and undesirable motive. Warmth and chill bespeak at once the depth of emotion or affection. But the special fineness of soul which shows itself in the active and judicious choice of the appropriate and the harmonious, the subtly fitting and the delicately adapted, seems best expressed by the name of one of the lowest and most vulgar of senses,taste. Whether the judgment be exercised in the choice of color harmony or musical composition, costume or personal ornament, architecture, monument, design or arrangement, poetry or passing jest, rug, menu, pastime or associates, it is the sense of taste which furnishes the apt name for the critical capacity. Not only is it in the usages of language that taste is a paradoxical sense; it is at the same time one of the most ancient of the special senses and also one about which exact knowledge is most difficult to acquire. It seems to afford a multitude of varying and distinctive nuances of sensation, yet it can boast but a meager equipment of four fundamental sense qualities. It is a primitive and well-established sense in the evolution of man, and individuals might therefore be expected to resemble xveach other closely in their experience of it; yet the most trite of proverbs insists that there is no accounting for tastes. Indeed, in some languages it is even impossible to find distinctive names for such common taste experiences as bitter or even salt and sour. A survey of the phenomena and laws of the sense of taste reveals, in fact, no end of curious and interesting situations. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 59082
Author: Hollingworth, Harry L. (Harry Levi)
Release Date: Mar 17, 2019
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Contributor (Author): Poffenberger, Albert T. (Albert Theodore), 1885-1977
Editor: Dearborn, George V. N., 1869-1938