Читать книгу Aromatics and the Soul: A Study of Smells онлайн

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So that in this, as in most superstitions, there is a substratum of truth.

But the point is, that the objection to bad smells preceded all those scientific discoveries and had, in the beginning, but a slender support from rationalism. Our forebears builded better than they knew. Their objection was in reality intuitive. It may be true that all nations occupying a corresponding level of civilisation will manifest the same instinctive abhorrences, but it has been left to the practical genius of the English race to give effect to the natural repugnance and to translate its urgings into practice.

The interesting question now arises: How and when did this intuition or instinct, this blind feeling, arise, and what transformed it from a mere individual objection, voiced here and there, to a mass-movement leading to a general popular reformation?

The first explanation that is likely to occur to us is, that it was due to the refinement of feeling that accompanies high civilisation operating in a community quick to respond and to react when a public benefit is anticipated. One of the results of culture is an increase in the delicacy of the senses. When men and women strive after refinement, they achieve it, becoming refined, in spite of what pessimists and so-called realists preach, not only in their outward behaviour, but also in their innermost thoughts and feelings, and this internal refinement implies among other things a quickening of the sense of disgust. There is naturally a close and intimate connection between the sense of smell and the nerve-centres which, when stimulated, evoke the feeling of nausea in the mind—and the bodily acts that follow it. We are here dealing, in fact, with a primitive protective impulse to ensure that evil-smelling things shall not be swallowed, and the means adopted by Nature to prevent that ingestion, or, if it has accidentally occurred, to reverse it, are prompt. And successful. There is no compromise with the evil thing.