ON THE SOUL
Book II
Chapter 10
What can be tasted is always something that can be touched, and just
for that reason it cannot be perceived through an interposed foreign
body, for touch means the absence of any intervening body. Further,
the flavoured and tasteable body is suspended in a liquid matter,
and this is tangible. Hence, if we lived in water, we should
perceive a sweet object introduced into the water, but the water would
not be the medium through which we perceived; our perception would
be due to the solution of the sweet substance in what we imbibed, just
as if it were mixed with some drink. There is no parallel here to
the perception of colour, which is due neither to any blending of
anything with anything, nor to any efflux of anything from anything.
In the case of taste, there is nothing corresponding to the medium
in the case of the senses previously discussed; but as the object of
sight is colour, so the object of taste is flavour. But nothing
excites a perception of flavour without the help of liquid; what
acts upon the sense of taste must be either actually or potentially
liquid like what is saline; it must be both (a) itself easily
dissolved, and (b) capable of dissolving along with itself the tongue.
Taste apprehends both (a) what has taste and (b) what has no taste, if
we mean by (b) what has only a slight or feeble flavour or what
tends to destroy the sense of taste. In this it is exactly parallel to
sight, which apprehends both what is visible and what is invisible
(for darkness is invisible and yet is discriminated by sight; so is,
in a different way, what is over brilliant), and to hearing, which
apprehends both sound and silence, of which the one is audible and the
other inaudible, and also over-loud sound. This corresponds in the
case of hearing to over-bright light in the case of sight. As a
faint sound is 'inaudible', so in a sense is a loud or violent
sound. The word 'invisible' and similar privative terms cover not only
(a) what is simply without some power, but also (b) what is adapted by
nature to have it but has not it or has it only in a very low
degree, as when we say that a species of swallow is 'footless' or that
a variety of fruit is 'stoneless'. So too taste has as its object both
what can be tasted and the tasteless-the latter in the sense of what
has little flavour or a bad flavour or one destructive of taste. The
difference between what is tasteless and what is not seems to rest
ultimately on that between what is drinkable and what is undrinkable
both are tasteable, but the latter is bad and tends to destroy
taste, while the former is the normal stimulus of taste. What is
drinkable is the common object of both touch and taste.
Since what can be tasted is liquid, the organ for its perception
cannot be either (a) actually liquid or (b) incapable of becoming
liquid. Tasting means a being affected by what can be tasted as
such; hence the organ of taste must be liquefied, and so to start with
must be non-liquid but capable of liquefaction without loss of its
distinctive nature. This is confirmed by the fact that the tongue
cannot taste either when it is too dry or when it is too moist; in the
latter case what occurs is due to a contact with the pre-existent
moisture in the tongue itself, when after a foretaste of some strong
flavour we try to taste another flavour; it is in this way that sick
persons find everything they taste bitter, viz. because, when they
taste, their tongues are overflowing with bitter moisture.
The species of flavour are, as in the case of colour, (a) simple,
i.e., the two contraries, the sweet and the bitter, (b) secondary, viz.
(i) on the side of the sweet, the succulent, (ii) on the side of the
bitter, the saline, (iii) between these come the pungent, the harsh,
the astringent, and the acid; these pretty well exhaust the
varieties of flavour. It follows that what has the power of tasting is
what is potentially of that kind, and that what is tasteable is what
has the power of making it actually what it itself already is.
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