The Higher and Lower Senses

When people are asked to state which are the higher and which the lower senses they feel no hesitation in deciding. When asked to arrange the various senses in an order of merit on this basis they are able to do so promptly. Moreover, their various arrangements agree very closely with each other. Vision commonly stands at the top of the series; then hearing; touch and smell are given third and fourth places about equally often; taste is likely to be next; and finally temperature, sensations of movement, and the more general organic sensations. When asked to state what meaning they give to the term “higher” in making this arrangement there is more disagreement in the nature of the replies. Occasionally an individual asserts that by “higher” he means more elaborate, complicated,—“highly” differentiated. A few individuals mean by “higher” more useful, indispensable,—“higher” in value. But by far the larger number of individuals mean neither the one nor the other of these two notions, but have in mind some characteristic which is not immediately related either to structural complexity, genetic antiquity, nor practical utility,—a characteristic which can only be described as ethical or Æsthetic.

Evidence of a cleavage of the senses on an ethical basis is abundant. Quotations from Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” may serve as representative of statements that can easily be found in the writings of all centuries, from the Socratic period, through the reflections of the schoolmen, down to the modern textbooks of psychology. Says Burton:

“Of these five senses sight is held to be most precious and the best.... Hearing is a most excellent outward sense.... Taste is a necessary sense.... Touch, the last and most ignoble of the senses, yet of as great necessity as the others, and of as much pleasure.”

Contemporary phraseology and convention are just as eloquent in the matter. There is common agreement that some of the senses, in their exercise or consequences, are ennobling, dignified, pure, and worthy; others, either in their exercise or consequences, are felt to be degrading, debasing, vile, and iniquitous. An individual who revels in impressions of sight and sound, and indulges to the utmost the raptures afforded by the tones, melodies, concords, the colors and their harmonies, and the elements of form, design, and arrangement, we are likely to find classified by his associates as “sensitive,” “temperamental,” “artistic.” But one who revels to the same or even much less degree in the unholy impressions of contact, temperature, smell, and taste is held to be “sensuous” rather than “sensitive,” “gluttonous” rather than “temperamental,” and “vicious” rather than “artistic.” The former pleasures minister to a “divine fire,” the latter only to “lust” and “appetite.”

Similarly, we esteem in quite distinctive manner the workman whose craft consists in the preparation and arrangement of sights and sounds in pleasing elements, orders, and compositions. He is held to have “acquired merit,” however unsuccessful his labors, and receives warm social approbation. He is an “artist.” But the workman whose craft consists in the preparation and presentation of acceptable sensations of taste, smell, touch, and temperature, what of him? He is neither held to have “acquired merit” nor to deserve any enviable amount of social recognition. He is only a “cook,” a “chef,” or, at the most, a “chemist” or a “dietitian.” Only in the comic supplements is he ever an “artist.” Painting, for instance, is held to be an “art”; but cooking is only a “service.” The one is rewarded by distinction and eminence, the other, when rewarded at all, by wages.

In the field of Æsthetics the distinction between the “higher” and the “lower” senses is no less clear. Museums and galleries we have in abundance in which are preserved and displayed the treasures of light and shade, color and form, line and arrangement. Private and public funds are appropriated in order that these impressions may have the widest possible circulation. Visitors and classes throng the corridors of these storehouses; teachers and schools flourish on the profits derived from the communication and publication of the principles concerned in their manufacture; statues are erected to the most deserving craftsmen; and earnest apprentices starve in foreign garrets in order that their handicraft may in time adorn these walls. Much the same thing is true of pleasing arrangements of sound impressions. All possible pains are taken to record the scheme and plan of their production, and the heartiest welcome is accorded any device, instrument, or organization which will facilitate their being stored up and poured out again for the delectation of remote or future audiences.

But to what museum or gallery shall one go who longs to experience the glorious array of pleasing contacts, textures and pressures, odors, tastes, and temperatures? Where shall one find stored up representatives of the most satisfying and thrilling touch impressions that experience has ever yielded, the whole gamut of delectable odors, with all the offensive ones left out; all the aromas and savors and flavors in which the gustatory and olfactory world is so rich? And all the organic thrills, the kinÆsthetic whirls and starts, and the delicious dizzinesses of static experiences? Coney Island and its brood are the only institutions that even pretend to minister to those whose nature yearns for these satisfactions, and Coney Island is supported neither by philanthropic endowment nor by public appropriations. It is even said that its joys are thought to be “vulgar” among certain classes of people, whose passions run mainly toward sights and sounds.

There can be no doubt about it. Certain of the senses are more Æsthetic than others, if by this we mean that special arts have been built up which busy themselves with the materials afforded by them. Certain of the senses, again, are unÆsthetic, in the sense that the materials afforded by them have not yielded to that sort of structural manipulation which constitutes the procedure of one of the “fine arts.” And, furthermore, such manipulation as they do submit to is not only not considered “fine,” but is designated by the negative term “unÆsthetic”; the materials themselves, as well as those who busy themselves with them, are quite likely to be esteemed “coarse” and “nasty.”

Bounty of Nature and Ecclesiastical Censorship

One may well inquire into the reasons for such a curious state of affairs. Does it merely signify that agreeable sights and sounds are so rare in nature that special social encouragement has come to be given for their production, while pleasing contacts, pressures, tastes, smells, etc., are so abundantly provided in the natural course of experience that no such sanction is called for? Even if this were true, does it follow that the sanction of the one group need necessarily involve the taboo of the other? Does it perhaps merely indicate that early in the history of art the Church and its leaders learned that the original tendency of men and women to indulge themselves in the voluptuous impressions of certain of the senses was so strong that the immediate joys of earth promised to outweigh the promised blessings of heaven? Such a discovery might well have resulted in an authoritative denunciation of these types of experience and in an artificial exaltation of the tamer and milder senses, whose objects could be perceived at a remote distance and by many observers, and could be, therefore, more minutely scrutinized by the ecclesiastic censors. Or does it perhaps mean that some of these sense impressions from their very nature are either unsuitable as materials for that sort of manipulation and craftsmanship which we call artistic, or, from their very nature or consequences, are inimical to and destructive of those endeavors which we have come, on other grounds, to conceive to be the most worthy and valuable tendencies of men and women? The bounty of nature and the ecclesiastical censorship we may dismiss from the present consideration, however worthy they may be of reflection, and confine our present inquiry to the question of whether or not the impressions afforded by some of the senses, such as taste, for example, are, by their very nature, inadequate as raw materials of Æsthetic manipulation and artistic creation.

The Psychophysical Attributes

It may be well to begin our inquiry with a consideration of certain of the technical psychological characteristics and properties of the different senses, properties which can be measured and expressed in quantitative terms. We may then observe whether their order, when arranged on these bases, shows any correspondence to their order in the scale of Æsthetic value, and where, in such a scale, the sense of taste belongs. The following table brings together the facts concerning four of these characteristics. In the first column the senses are arranged in the commonly accepted order of Æsthetic value, and the degree of correspondence can be easily made out by comparing this column with those in which the various other properties are indicated.

It requires only a glance at this table to reveal the fact that we possess much more definite knowledge about sight and hearing in these respects than we do about the other modes of sensation. In the case of these two senses, the four characteristics indicated in the table can be stated with considerable precision and certainty. But in the case of the other senses, and of taste in particular, only broad and vague statements can be made, for the most part. Even the number of discriminable qualities which these senses afford is unknown, and statements concerning the other properties are mainly confessions of difficulty or ignorance. It is difficult to judge to what degree this state of affairs is due simply to the greater attention that has been given to sight and hearing in precise psychological investigation, and to what degree it is due to difficulties inherent in the nature of the sense impressions afforded by the other modes. Nevertheless, it is apparent that no one of the special characteristics indicated in the table can be held responsible for the sharp cleavage commonly made between the worthy and the ignoble senses. Consideration of the characteristics in detail shows that we must look elsewhere for the reasons why the lower senses are unÆsthetic, and even, perhaps, for the reasons why they are lower.

With respect to number of discriminable qualities, for instance, sight and hearing, with their many thousand distinguishable degrees of impression, might seem to afford such an abundance of raw material that this alone would explain why the principal fine arts have come to be based on these senses. But it must be pointed out that this enumeration of qualities has reference only to the definitely identifiable, classifiable, and controllable degrees of impression. The mere fact that odors can be classified under only nine headings, to which general terms can be given, does not at all mean that there are but nine distinguishable smells. Almost every different object in the world has its own characteristic odor. We have not developed abstract names for these odors, to be sure. We are usually content to designate the odor by the name of the object with which it is associated. And when one bears in mind the multitudinous variations of these odors, their different intensities, mixtures, and modifications, one is inclined to believe that it is only the infinite variety of smell experiences that prevents our enumerating, classifying, and designating them. And what has just been said of smell is equally true of touch, taste, and organic sensations. It is also true that the separate lower senses are seldom stimulated independently,—thus taste is always accompanied by smell, touch, temperature, etc. May it perhaps be true that the very fact that these impressions cannot be estimated, isolated, and reproduced at will has something to do with their inferior Æsthetic value? However this may be, it is clear that the mere variety of impressions afforded is not the criterion of which we are in search.

One might be tempted to suppose that the sharpness of discrimination of the various senses, the keenness with which differences in the strength and intensity of impressions can be detected, might be an important factor in determining their availability for Æsthetic manipulation. The figures given in the table under this heading indicate the proportion that must be added to a stimulus in order to make it just perceptibly more intense. The temptation is removed at once by a mere inspection of the values. Sight is, to be sure, the most delicate of the senses in this respect, as it is also in number of isolable qualities. But kinÆsthetic sensation follows close upon it, while smell stands third in the list, and hearing is no more sensitive than pressure. In the case of taste and the other senses the values are unknown or difficult to determine, but it is clear that the Æsthetic values of the different senses do not depend merely on their various psychophysical constants.

The quickness with which one can react to or perceive impressions from the various senses discloses much the same state of affairs. Basing our comparison on the average reaction times to the most commonly available impressions and intensities in each case, hearing, touch, and temperature are seen to be about equally prompt, while sight stands fourth on the list. With respect to the period of time through which a sensation continues to persist, the so-called “life span” of an impression, only three of the values, those for sight, hearing, and touch, have been determined, and these bear no significant relations to each other. But these times are all very short, and the corresponding modes of sensation stand high in the Æsthetic scale. The other values, although not determined, are known to be much longer than these. Is it possible that the sluggishness of these senses and the persistence of impressions once set up through them is so great that the impressions do not submit to the forms, patterns, and structures which constitute artistic treatment? Or may it not be equally true that the fugitive character of impressions from the higher senses is what has made necessary the development of treatment by means of pattern and structure?

Suggested by this question of “life span” of sensations is another characteristic which one might expect to find important,—viz., what we have in an early chapter referred to as the “tendency to adaptation” of the different senses. In the case of odors, temperatures, and contacts, we easily and speedily become adapted to continuous presence of impressions and cease to be aware of their existence. Thus, we soon become adapted to the presence of hats on our heads, the clothes on our backs, the smell of smoke, and even to such extreme temperatures as that of the stoking room. Continuous stimulation of one of these senses so raises the threshold of the sense organ that the original stimulus ceases to be effective. So far as practical and Æsthetic purposes are concerned, we are then fatigued to the particular impression. We may be gratified to find that this tendency to adaptation is not nearly so conspicuous in the case of sight. But we will be equally dismayed to learn that the tendency is as prominent in the case of hearing as it is in the so-called lower senses. Moreover, this tendency refers to continued stimulation of the same degree or quality, whereas in Æsthetic manipulation the qualities presented are varied from moment to moment and from point to point.

On the whole, then, these strictly psychological or psychophysical comparisons are so unsatisfactory that we are compelled to look elsewhere for the criteria of the raw material of Æsthetics. Some writers have suggested that the absence of definite and formal spatial attributes and systems is what makes certain of the senses unsuitable for Æsthetic treatment. But there are two important objections to this suggestion. One is our earlier question as to the reasons why Æsthetic treatment should necessarily consist of arrangement in spatial and temporal series and patterns. Unless some excellent reason to the contrary is given, we are free to assume that this is not a necessity, but merely an incidental result, following from the character of the materials, which, for other reasons, for which we seek, are chosen as the raw materials for Æsthetic treatment. The other objection, which is, perhaps, more convincing, is the fact that, whereas touch and kinÆsthetic impressions both possess immediate voluminousness and take their place readily in a spatial manifold of position, direction, distance, and form, they do not yield to Æsthetic treatment; while sound and taste, one of which easily ranks second and the other of which belongs low down in our Æsthetic scale, possess extent in only a very doubtful and probably analogical manner, and are almost, if not wholly, lacking in those qualities which would enable them to participate in a manifold of position, direction, distance, and form. As for temporal attributes, such as duration and sequence, all impressions possess them, from whatever sense they originate. The idea that the difficulty or impossibility of giving spatial and temporal form to the lower sensations prevents the representation of nature by means of them, and that this is a sufficient reason for regarding them as inferior is anything but adequate.

Immediate Affective Value of Taste

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.”

This, we have said, is an illuminating paragraph. But it is satisfactory only when amplified in certain ways to which we seem to have been led in our preceding discussion. Thus, it cannot be said that the socially shared sense impressions are chosen as the raw material of the fine arts merely because they enable a multiplication of individual pleasures. The dominant passion of the artist is not merely to afford pleasure to the greatest possible number of observers. But so long as art is defined as an attempt to please, that is about all that follows from the social character of the higher senses. As a matter of fact, artists do not seek to please the greatest possible number of observers. They are often contented if a single observer is satisfied. And by satisfied, in this connection, one does not mean pleased. We have already seen that the most pleasing of all sense impressions are those afforded by the lower senses. If the mere production of pleasure is the chief aim of the artist, he would surely have resorted to those materials which in themselves and by their own direct effects facilitated his purpose.

The Unsystematic Relations of Taste Qualities

Another characteristic of those sense materials which enter into art products,—especially vision and hearing,—is the fact that the various experiences constituting the sense manifold exhibit structural and systematic relationships. We do not here refer to the possibility of spatial arrangement and form. This we have already discussed and dismissed as an inadequate criterion. We mean, rather, those facts represented, in the case of vision, by the color pyramid and similar schemes for representing the qualitative relations of visual sensations; and, in the case of sound, by the tonal scale and such graded intensity scales as may be devised. Definite and formulable relations with respect to such facts as fusion, harmony, tonality, and melody; saturation, contrast, complementariness, mixture, etc., may be made out in the cases of vision and hearing. Æsthetic manipulation takes the form of playing upon these relationships. The visual and auditory qualities constitute not merely a manifold, but yield systematic structures. But the sense of taste and the other lower sensation modes tend to constitute a mere unorganized manifold.

Now, it may be at once suggested that we here have the adequate criterion of the Æsthetic for which we are searching, and that this is at bottom the reason why it is the visual and auditory experiences that are “described, discussed, repeated, and measured (and) creatively reËmbodied in works of art.”

But even this account is, as a matter of fact, very one-sided and in part, at least, fallacious. We do not know what structural systems would be exhibited by the lower sense experiences if we had only discussed them, measured them, and creatively embodied them to the degree to which we have gone in the case of the higher senses. We cannot be sure, in the present state of our knowledge, to what degree the appearance of superior organization on the part of the higher senses is due to the amount of effort and inquiry we have bestowed upon their examination. All that we really know is that innumerable studies have been made of sight and sound, and that we are able to represent their results in the form of schemes and systems; whereas, comparatively few studies of the intensive type have been made of the various “lower senses,” and we are proportionately unable to construct the corresponding schemes and structures. Which is cause and which is effect? Do the lower senses fail to provide the raw materials of Æsthetic construction because of their lack of elaborate and systematic organization, or do they owe this very deficiency to the relative neglect they have suffered at the hands of the artist?

The Motive of Æsthetic Products

There is some further reason why the Æsthetic sense impressions are those which are genetically most recent, in imagination the most capable of clear and persistent revival, pertaining mainly to the distance receptors, informing us of objects which may be socially shared, and capable of systematic and organized description. It seems that this reason is simply that the main thing about an Æsthetic presentation, arrangement, or composition is, after all, its intellectual content, its “message.” The artist desires, above all, to eliminate our own immediate and instinctive reactions to his materials. In so far as he is an artist, he is not satisfied with presenting to us a pleasing array of sense materials. His main concern is in communicating to his observers some situation, some theme, some state of affairs, some meaning, some purely relational fact. Such emotions as are stirred in us he does not wish to come from his mere materials, but from his own manipulation of them, from the form or pattern which he gives them, from the meaning which he thereby conveys to us. The true artist, in other words, is neither a chemist, nor an athlete, nor a technician of any sort whatsoever, but a philosopher.

Stout makes a similar comment when he says: “The distinction between what we call the higher and lower senses rests on this contrast between the intrinsic impressiveness of sensations and their value for perceptual consciousness.... The relatively higher senses deserve this title in proportion as they are more delicately discriminative and more capable of being combined in successive and simultaneous groups and series, while preserving their distinctive differences. On the other hand, each several sensation is proportionately less important through its own intensity and pleasant or painful character. Any direct effect produced by its own intrinsic intensity and affective tone would interfere with its value as a vehicle of meaning—as an indication of something beyond its own existence. Thus, as perceptual consciousness becomes relatively more prominent and important, sensation is more delicately differentiated, more definitely restricted, less intense, and less strongly toned in the way of pleasure and pain.”

The comments one is offered in the books on “art,”—eulogies of Raphael’s rich color tones, Rembrandt’s lights and shadows, Rubens’ flesh tints, Meissonier’s minute details, Turner’s accurate reproduction of ferns and mosses, smoke and fog, and so on, represent a deliberate degradation of the work of the artist to the level of cookery, the manufacture of perfumery, dye-stuffs, and the operation of merry-go-rounds. It is crediting the artist with just that result which Æsthetic manipulation has always sought not to produce,—the presentation of sense materials, which of their own right awaken strong feeling tone in the observer. When George Frederick Watts attempted, beyond those before him, to convey meaning through his arrangements of sense impressions he refused to attend minutely to the details of technique, and critics subsequently said of him, “His technique is faulty.” Perhaps it was, but that is the sort of comment one passes on an athlete, a ventriloquist, or a juggler. One might just as significantly criticize the literary style of a mathematician or a logician as the technique of an artist. Such criticisms, to be sure, have a legitimate place in life. But the critic of the mathematician’s literary style should not delude himself into the belief that he is discussing mathematics, nor the critic of the artist’s technique fancy that he is dealing with his art. For the real artist is a philosopher, and that is the reason why the lower senses are unÆsthetic.