[218]. Sully, The Human Mind, vol. ii. p. 146.
[219]. Mind, October 1878.
[220]. The Human Mind, ii. p. 148.
[221]. Æsthetic activity is that form of play which uses images as its creative materials. It is generally admitted that visual and auditory perceptions or representations are the only ones which provoke æsthetic emotion; yet Guyau (followed perhaps by others) has maintained that we must attribute this power to all external sensations, without exception (Problèmes de l’esthétique contemporaine, chap. vi.), heat, cold, contacts, tastes, and odours; but the facts he enumerates are in most cases referable to association, especially where odours are concerned. The so-called lower sensations do not act directly, they only revive the representations of sight and hearing. A delicious coolness, a soft contact, an intoxicating odour produce an agreeable state—i.e., a physical pleasure, and nothing more, if there is no association. Besides, without entering into an idle and hair-splitting discussion, it is sufficient to observe that, as a matter of fact, there exists no art, in the æsthetic sense, based on any other sensations than those of sight and hearing, unless we are to look on perfumery and cookery as such.
Why is this privilege exclusively confined to two species of sensations? Various reasons have been given: because they are more remote from the life-serving functions with which the sensations of touch, taste, and smell are closely connected (II. Spencer); or because their pleasures and pains have, in general, a moderate character, and their special nerves are rarely subjected to a violent shock (Gurney); or, according to Grant Allen, because the nerves of the lower senses are excited in mass, and those of the higher by isolated fibres (? ?). It appears to me that one of the principal reasons has been forgotten. If we refer back to the inquiries detailed in Chap. IX. (Part I.) as to the olfactory and gustatory images, we shall see that they have their own peculiar characters. For visual and auditory images, revival and association are easy, whether simultaneously, in groups, or successively, in series. For images of smell and taste, it is quite the contrary; their revivability is feeble or nil, their power of association with each other nil. (The tactile-motor images form an intermediate group, but nearer to the lower senses.) These psychological conditions render them quite unsuitable for a place in a constructive scheme. Called up with great difficulty by the memory, incapable of being grouped, either in simultaneities or in series, they can supply neither an art in rest nor an art in movement.
[222]. Hobbes, Human Nature (2nd ed.), 1650.
[223]. Bain, The Emotions, p. 257.
[224]. Sully, Sensation and Intuition, p. 262; The Human Mind, i. p. 148.
[225]. “Physiology of Laughter,” Essays, vol. i. (1883) pp. 194 et seq.
[226]. Physiologie und Psychologie des Lachens und des Komischen (1873). For criticisms, see Léon Dumont, Theorie scientifique de la sensibilité, p. 211; Piderit, Mimik, pp. 138 et seq.