Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/18

 The metabolic sense is the sense of taste and smell, these being varieties of one sense. While yet in the animal state, man learns to enjoy the ambrosial senses in partaking of food and drink and in inhaling the air laden with many particles given off by natural bodies; but in passing into the human state, man invents a multiplicity of devices for making his food, drink, and the air which he breathes pleasurable. All ambrosial pleasures are developed by experience, but the process of enhancing pleasures has its antithesis in the evolution of pain; hence many pleasures and their antitheses, pains, have been evolved during the historic period. Without entering into a systematic treatment of the subject, it may be well to illustrate this statement as the facts are shown in individual experience and in the history of peoples.

When the uninitiated person first attempts to use tobacco in any form, it is unpleasant or even loathsome; but gradually by experience he learns to tolerate it and finally to enjoy it. If its use was universal with men, women, and children, it cannot be doubted that an hereditary love of tobacco would be developed, and thus the taste of tobacco would become innate and the judgment of its pleasant effects would be intuitive. Its extensive use seems to indicate a tendency to an hereditary love of tobacco used in one or another of the customary methods, although the period for which it has been used dates no farther back than the discovery of America. That which we wish to emphasize in this place is that the pleasure derived from the usage is artificial and is developed by experience, and that while new pleasures originate, antithetic pains arise by the development of an appetite which, ungratified, is pain.

If we contemplate the use of intoxicant beverages, like facts appear, for it is found that pleasures of the inebriating beverage must be developed by experience, and again it is found that the love of these bacchanalian pleasures has a tendency to become hereditary and to engender an appetite that produces pain. In