“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_