Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/443

No. 4.] of stimulation again being our test, we are in as much doubt regarding the æsthetics of taste and smell as we were with sight and hearing. An argument for specific nerves has sometimes been made from the fact that sweets are usually pleasant and bitters disagreeable for most people. But on the one hand the law of specific energies must not be 'usual' but invariable; and, on the other, the law of association does not demand that the results of all sweets should have been beneficial and of all bitters harmful to have given birth to an abstract association of sweet with 'nice' and of bitter with 'bad.' A vast majority of pleasant remembrances of sweet and beneficial viands would outweigh a lot of infrequent experiences of harmful and poisonous substances. The laws of association, therefore, seem best to cover the case.

No taste is always agreeable in the same way that vinegar always tastes sour, and perhaps there is no taste always disagreeable. Should there prove to be any constantly unpleasant tastes they would be accountable to pain nerves so located as to affect us warningly against influences, mechanical or chemical, of or resembling a class on the whole having proved harmful. Again this is a matter for detailed examination. The æsthetics of smell and taste may do without them, and are all associations save these possible exceptions.

We have said that the pleasures of eating are among the most sensuous that we have. We believe these grosser pleasures of eating come from the act of eating rather than from the kind of food eaten; that the precise stimulations causing the taste and the smells do not cause these pleasures. But these pleasures should not be classed here, but with the various sensations — muscular, digestive, tactual, circulatory, or what they may — into which the processes of eating may be analyzed.

We now reach the skin. Among temperature feelings, certain pretty constant reactions indicate æsthetic temperature sensations proper. Goldscheider and several people have demonstrated specific nerves of heat and of cold. Dr. Lombard and others have discovered of the various kinds of tissue in the skin — connective, elastic, and muscular — that some