Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/107

Rh resemble in their action the simple chemical irritants, and not the odours.

It must be remembered, however, that, as we have said, the cat and the spider efluvia induce an emotional effect simply, without local irritation. And emotional change not only follows, it may also precede, the perception of an odour.

The following anecdote of Goethe, for example, shows how smell may affect the personality before it is recognised as an odour by the consciousness :

“An air that was beneficial to Schiller acted on me like poison,” Gocthe said to Eckermann, “I called on him one day, and as 1 did not find him at home, I seated myself at his writing-table to note down various matters. I had not been seated long before I felt a strange indisposition steal over me, which gradually increased, until at last I nearly fainted. At first I did not know to what cause I should ascribe this wretched, and to me unusual, state, until I discovered that a dreadful odour issued from a drawer near me. When I opened it I found, to my astonishment, that it was full of rotten apples. I immediately went to the window, and inhaled the fresh air, by which I was instantly restored. Meanwhile his wife came in, and told me that the drawer was always filled with rotten apples, because the scent was beneficial to Schiller, and he could not live without it.”

I wish to emphasise, for the sake of my argument, that Goethe underwent a profound constitutional disturbance, with its attendant discomfort, before he realised that its cause was an odour.

If, then, an odour can induce such emotional