The testimony of daily experience would probably be at once that the various elementary tastes may combine to produce new tastes of a more complex or even of a unitary character. Thus, the taste of lemonade is distinctive enough. Yet even casual observation suffices to show that the sweet and the sour components have by no means lost their identity, since each can be singled out in attention and recognized as the familiar elementary quality. Red and blue may fuse to produce a violet or a purple from which the original elements can by no means be singled out and identified through direct inspection. But it seems to be the rule that tastes do not behave in this way, although the demands of daily experience do not readily lead us to discover the fact. “Think, for instance,” writes Titchener, “of the flavor of a ripe peach. The ethereal odor may be ruled out by holding the nose. The taste components,—sweet, bitter, sour,—may be identified by special direction of the attention upon them. The touch components—the softness and stringiness of the pulp, the puckery feel of the sour—may be singled out in the same way. Nevertheless, all these factors blend together so intimately that it Is hard to give up one’s belief in a peculiar and unanalyzable peach flavor. Indeed, some psychologists assert that this resultant flavor exists; that in all such cases the concurrence of the taste qualities gives rise to a new basic or fundamental taste, which serves, so to say, as background to the separate components. There is, however, no need to make any such assumption. It is a universal rule in psychology that when sense qualities combine to form what is called a perception, the result of their combination is not a sum but a system, not a patchwork but a pattern.... Hence, just as it would be absurd to say that the plan of the locomotive is a new bit of steel or the pattern of the carpet a new bit of colored stuff, so is it wrong to say that the peach character of a certain taste blend is a new taste quality.” The mixture of stimuli provoking two taste qualities does not, then, produce intermediate qualities such as the orange which results from the mixture of red and yellow. Instead, in this case, the two qualities do one of these three things: (a) they may remain separate and distinct; (b) they may fluctuate individually and alternate with each other in their appearance; (c) they may tend to neutralize each other. If the stimuli are very intense, oscillation is the common result. If the stimuli are weak, some degree of neutralization is reported to be the rule. Only in one case, namely, the mixture of sweet and salt, does a new taste seem to emerge, which does not resemble either of the original qualities. Kiesow finds that such a mixture, in the case of weak solutions, gives rise to a quality described as “flat,” “vapid,” or “insipid,”—the alkaline taste which we have already considered. _Compensation, Antagonism, and Neutralization_