The Sense of TasteHollingworth, Harry L. (Harry Levi)
Science
The Sense of Taste
Hollingworth, Harry L. (Harry Levi)
Taste
Although the sense of taste is more strictly a “biological” sense than
any of the other simple senses of man—that is, more particularly
concerned with the underlying bodily life—it plays, nevertheless, a very
important part in our personal psychology. Many of us find in tasting
one of the fairly dependable satisfactions of our everyday living; and
Satisfaction, it seems upon long reflection, comes pretty close to being
the long-sought “highest good.” The wholly needless and harmful bodily
overweight of many of us attests how often this sense is made a
malignant fetish to lure us evilward. Eve tasted—and in that alluring
moment set an example too plain and too significant ever to be ignored.
The sense of taste, none the less, is a wholly respectable and dignified
mode of obtaining satisfaction.
And our respective “research magnificent” would _not_ be quite so
interesting, not so adventuresome, were our sense of taste, instead of a
clear sense experience tingling always with some kind of satisfaction,
were it, I say, only a subconscious instinct, part of the original
organic nature of man, working in the dark of consciousness. And for a
few of us, especially if we be chefs, or cooks, or tea-tasters, or
dyspeptics, or epicures, or gluttons, or taste-perverts, and the like,
taste is, perhaps, one of the most important of all mortal experiences
and of all scientific themes. And to the children how _much_ it is!
Professor Hollingworth and his Columbia colleague, Doctor Poffenberger,
have written a volume which seemingly would satisfy both the scientific
reader and the general readers who from curiosity seek its information.
The business man as well as his wife sitting beyond the living-room
table will both find the something they hoped to find; and the keen
school teacher and the all too infrequent schoolmaster will find part of
that material for the development of intensive sense-training now
obviously indispensable to the further evolution of our school system.
For even taste, least intellectual of our senses, can be intensively and
hence usefully trained and thus education be furthered.
The authors need no introduction to the educated million, but if they
did, this book would furnish one which the most exclusive hardly could
disdain. They are to be congratulated on the success with which they
have put much that is at once interesting and scientific up to the hour
into little space, with “war-time economy.” The authors have covered
their field well.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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