Perhaps the greatest surprise comes when we consider the immediate affective value of impressions from the different senses. Impressions of taste, smell, and contact bear with them or immediately provoke very definite and powerful feelings,—feelings of pleasantness and disagreeableness, excitement and calm, tension and relief. Still more complex emotions than these simple feelings are called up more easily and universally by impressions from these senses than in any other way. Their immediate pleasure tone and their associated emotions may be, and usually are, exceedingly rich and intense. The smell of new-mown hay, coffee, flowers, whiffs of the salt sea breeze, the odors of animals, foods, spices, and herbs move us to strong emotions. The stroking of fur, the cool of evening, the delicious languor of a sun bath—all these have high and immediate affective value that can hardly be exceeded by any emotions provoked by colors, forms, noises, and tones. In general, those senses that are closely connected with our personal and bodily welfare, as is the case with taste, provoke strong affective reactions and convey to us a strong sense of reality. Those senses which are much less intimately related to our immediate bodily welfare possess much weaker feeling tone and provoke much less emphatic emotional reactions. Disagreeable odors, tastes, and contacts are quite beyond our endurance, but few are the sights and sounds to which we cannot easily reconcile ourselves. Here, then, we have the interesting and perhaps unexpected fact that the sense impressions possess æsthetic value just to the degree that they fail to arouse in us definite and powerful feelings. The inverted arrangement on the basis of æsthetic value gives us precisely the order on the basis of immediate affective value. Santayana’s assertion that the small range and variety of pleasure-toned qualities among the lower senses explains their non-æsthetic character, in part, is seen to be not only inadequate, but even a perversion of the facts. Just in that degree to which sense impressions fail to produce in us immediate pleasures and aversions, fail to provoke us to instinctive emotions of joy and disgust, fail to stir in us moods of irritation and acquiescence,—in just that degree do they declare themselves to be adequate raw materials for the fine arts. If, as we are often told, the primary purpose of art is to please, this must be an entirely unexpected state of affairs, and the low position of taste in the æsthetic scale becomes quite unintelligible.
Development in the Individual and the Race
Perhaps this is as appropriate a place as any in which to point out that the order of the senses, on the basis of their æsthetic value, is approximately that of their philogenetic and ontogenetic development. The simplest and most undifferentiated forms of animal life possess, in more or less rudimentary form, sensitivity to impressions which must resemble closely what we know as contact, pressure, movement, and temperature. Touch, as Aristotle tells us, is the “mother sense.” Starting from this form of sensibility as a basis, the other senses develop as we ascend the animal series, by processes of increasing complexity and refinement. Taste and smell, as we know those experiences, were probably the next to differentiate themselves from the vague mass of tactual and organic sensation, then hearing, and last of all sight. And there is evidence of sequence within a single sense; thus it would appear that brightness vision, sensibility to mere light and shadow, antedated color vision by a considerable interval, and even that sensibilities to the various color impressions developed in some sort of serial order. It is also true that the sense organs upon which fall the stimulations of the physical world are, at the birth of the individual, in very diverse conditions of functional perfection. The nerves which underlie sensations of taste, touch, temperature, and pain operate perfectly at birth. Hearing is defective for one to two weeks after birth, and the mechanism of vision is still more imperfect and commonly remains so for several weeks. From the point of view of the three meanings of the word “higher,” the ethical, the æsthetic, and the genetic, the order of the senses is the same. Such close agreement cannot be entirely without significance.
The Imaginative Value of Taste
A further characteristic which correlates closely with the æsthetic arrangement is to be found in the relative ease with which images can be called up and contemplated in the various modes of sensation, in the absence of any physical stimulation,—what we may call the imaginative possibilities of the different senses. With most people visual and auditory imagery is both more vivid and intense, and more facile and prompt, than is imagery within any of the other sensory modes. We have in another section referred to one observer who recorded his mental images as they occurred or were noticed until 2,500 had been enumerated, and who reports that 57 per cent of them were visual, 29 per cent auditory, leaving only a total of 14 per cent for images from all the other senses. Dreams, which consist mainly of imagery experiences, are commonly visual in character, with hearing a close second, and the other modes hardly represented at all. Hallucinations reported by supposedly normal people are in 90 per cent of the cases either visual or auditory, and the visual are about twice as frequently reported as the auditory. Records of hallucinations among the insane show vision and hearing clearly most prominent, with hearing somewhat more prominent than sight. Can it be that the possibility of recall in the form of imagery, contemplation in the absence of the original stimulus or object, is one of the prime qualifications of sensory impressions that are to serve as æsthetic material? There will probably be no exception taken to such a generalization on the part of anybody. The order on the basis of imaginative value is identical with that on the basis of æsthetic value, ethical value, and genetic development.
The Non-Social Character of the Lower Senses
It is interesting to note that the higher senses are also the so-called distance receptors; they do not require immediate contact with the stimulus-producing object, whereas the lower senses inform us mainly concerning objects that are in direct or approximate contact with our own body. By virtue of this fact, as has often been remarked, it is possible for many of us to see the same object, such as a rainbow, however far apart we may be from each other. And we can all hear the same melody-producing instrument if we place ourselves within a certain fairly large area. But social experience is scarcely possible in the case of contact, taste, smell, temperature. Here the most we can do is to get the experiences in succession, and even this is often impossible. Even when it is possible to get the experiences in this way, by taking turns, we find it difficult to confer over them, since all conference is now on the basis of memory images, and, as we have already seen, we find it difficult, if, indeed, not quite impossible, to call up clear and persistent images of the impressions afforded by these senses.
It is true of some of these senses that in their enjoyment the stimulus itself is consumed. Whenever this is the case the sense concerned will be found to be one of the so-called lower, unæsthetic senses. Not only is social experience of the enjoyable object impossible, but even the single individual cannot himself get the experience again. Can it be, perhaps, that, as Thorndike remarks, “the pleasures of taste are not called æsthetic because one cannot eat his cake and have it, too”? It begins now to look as though only those sense impressions can become æsthetic vehicles which somehow lead beyond themselves, and beyond the immediate gratification of the individual, and facilitate some sort of social operation, or conference, or participation. In saying this we do not have reference to the doctrine that one often hears emphasized,—viz., that the lower senses, such as taste, are low and unæsthetic because they minister mainly to our personal and physiological needs. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is not because taste, smell, and touch are mainly concerned in telling us of facts that are of fundamental vital importance to us as individuals that they are low or unæsthetic, but only because they do nothing more than this,—because they cannot become the vehicle of our individual and social conference and communication.
In this connection let me quote an illuminating comment from Miss Calkins’ chapter on “Perception” in her “Introduction to Psychology.” As she there writes:
“It thus appears that even perception, the consciousness, as we call it, of outer things, is a consciousness of other selves as sharing our experience, a relatively altruistic, not an exclusively egoistic mode of consciousness. This is the reason why we usually speak of sight and hearing and smell as higher senses—and in the order named—than taste and the dermal sense experiences. Vision is the sense most readily shared by any number of selves: for example, everybody within a very wide area may see the mountain on the horizon or the Milky Way in the evening sky. Next to vision, sounds are the most frequently shared experiences; millions of people hear the same thunder and thousands may share the same concert. Even odors, though shared by fewer people, may be common to very many, whereas tastes and pressures and pains, which require actual bodily contact, and warmth and cold, whose physiological stimulation depends on conditions of the individual body, are far less invariably shared experiences. But the shared experiences are those that are described, discussed, repeated, measured—in other words, those that are creatively reëmbodied in works of art and in scientific investigations. Vision, therefore, is a higher sense than the others, only in so far as it is more often shared, and hence more often discussed and described, measured and verified. This is the reason why it is a more significant social material of intercourse, art, and science. Pressure and warmth, on the other hand, are less valued, because they are less often actually shared and, therefore, less easily verified and less frequently described.”