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.