The Sense of Taste

'The Sense of Taste' is a treatise on the gustatory system by two Columbia University psychologists, H. L. Hollingworth and A. T. Poffenberger. The authors regarded the sense of taste to be in numerous ways the most paradoxical of all the senses. Although, as a source of sense impression, it can afford the keenest immediate feelings of pleasure and delight, the books on aesthetics and art have little or nothing to say about it. Skill in the compounding of tastes and flavors, or discrimination in their relish, brings the expert neither artistic recognition nor social eminence. Taste, it is constantly asserted, is one of the «lower senses,» and neither in the enjoyment of it nor the ministration to it is there to be acquired the merit and general esteem that readily distinguish an art from a service.