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

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At this stage, albeit early in our disquisition, we may appropriately turn to consider the curious fact that of all our senses that of smell is perhaps the most easily exhausted. The olfactory organ, under the continued stimulation of one particular odour, quite quickly becomes insensitive to it. Perhaps this is the reason, or one of the reasons, why reform was so long delayed.

There are, however, in this respect great differences between odours. With some the smell is lost in a few seconds, while with others we continue to be aware of it for a much longer time. Curiously enough, odours seem, in this matter, to follow the general law of the feelings in that the pleasant are lost sooner than the unpleasant. It is the first breath of the rose that makes the fullest appeal, when the whole being becomes for a moment suffused with the loveliest of all perfumes. But only for a moment. All too soon the door of heaven closes and the richness thins away into the common airs of this our lower world.