Evolutionists have suggested that the pleasure we find in the perfume of a flower may be an emotional reflection from æons enormously remote, when such odor announced, to forms of ancestral life far lower than human, the presence of savory food. To what organic memory of association might be due, upon the same hypothesis, our pleasure in the perfume of youth?
Perhaps there were ages in which that perfume had significances more definite and special than any which we can now attach to it. Like the pleasure yielded by the fragrance of flowers, the pleasure given by the healthy fragrance of a young body may be, partly at least, a survival from some era in which odorous impressions made direct appeal to the simplest of life-serving impulses. Long dissociated from such possible primitive relation, odor of blossom and odor of youth alike have now become for us excitants of the higher emotional life,—of vague but voluminous and supremely delicate æsthetic feeling.
Like the feeling awakened by beauty, the pleasure of odor is a pleasure of remembrance,—is the magical appeal of a sensation to countless memories of countless lives. And even as the scent of a blossom evokes the ghosts of feelings experienced in millions of millions of unrecorded springs,—so the fragrance of youth bestirs within us the spectral survival of sensations associated with every vernal cycle of all the human existence that has vanished behind us.
And this fragrance of fresh being likewise makes invocation to ideal sentiment,—to parental scarcely less than to amorous tenderness,—because conjoined through immeasurable time with the charm and the beauty of childhood. Out of night and death is summoned by its necromancy more than a shadowy thrill from the rapture of perished passion,—more than a phantom-reflex from the delight of countless bridals;—even something also of the ecstasy of pressing lips of caress to the silky head of the first-born,—faint refluence from the forgotten joy of myriad millions of buried mothers.
Azure Psychology
