THE SENSE OF SMELL. 277 



you so want it, you can procure a vernal enjoyment even to your nerves of 

 taste. And what is there in tliat verdure, in that fragrance, in that soft breeze, 

 that so works upon your soul ? Why is the green carpet unable to breathe into 

 your, heart a desire for travelling, or the warm stove that secret longing so 

 often sung by the bards of spring ? Physiology has no better answer to these 

 questions than poelry, but in these and other innumerable facts it sees evidences 

 of the normal dependence of the actions of the soul upon the qualities of the 

 physical processes in the excited nerves, and the processes of sensation un- 

 avoidably conditioned by the former. In other words, the outer world compels 

 our soul not only to feel, but, indirectly, also to think, to form conceptions, even 

 to will, and thus leads, as if by a thread, that proud being that fancies to walk 

 in such unconditional independence of the laws of the physical world. What 

 a poor thing would the human soul be without the senses ; nay, it is not even 

 imaginable without them! A man born without any senses could scarcely 

 vegetate ; it would be absurd to talk of his living psychically. The sou) 

 develops its abilities only in the school of the senses ; only the senses convey 

 to it the materials for thinking, for the formation of conceptions and ideas ;' 

 only the senses give it the primary objective points for the development and 

 exercise of its volition ; the will, even if an imminent and inborn faculty of the 

 soul, would, without the senses, be a latent force. I leave it to the reader 

 to picture to himself what I have only hinted at, to form an idea of the 

 spiritual activity of a man cut off from his birth from all sensuous perception. 

 After an unprejudiced examination everybody will arrive at the same result, 

 at the conviction that psychical life v/ithout senses is to us something entirely 

 inconceivable, the best proof of which is that at every attempt to imagine the 

 soul surviving and separate from the body, we are compelled to endow it with 

 senses and the ability of reacting upon external bodily things, else our attempt 

 fails from the beginning. The instinct, however, of forming such an image is 

 necessary, and deeply rooted in the human soul, educated as the latter is under 

 earthly circumstances, from which it borrows all its conceptions ; no one can 

 free himself of that instinct. 



In short, the soul, in its earthly career, is first the pupil, and subsequently, 

 through life, the slave of the senses, inseparably connected with them, as the 

 steam-engine is with the fire, which engenders its motive power and renders 

 its activity possible. Deprive a grown-up person, who from childhood has been 

 in full possession of all his senses, of only one of them — the sense of sight, 

 for instance — and observe how poor his educated soul becomes through this 

 single loss, how narrowed its circle of ideas, how one-sided the exercise of its 

 volition ; deprive him of several, and see into what pitiable poverty even the 

 richest soul will sink. 



It is true the sense of smell is of all the least necessary, and still it is a tyrant 

 like the others, and plays its part as such openly or behind the scene. It, too, 

 moulds our disposition, awakens desires — most material desires, too — and these 

 are followed by actions which, when speaking of man, we boldly designate as 

 entirely voluntary, (because they can be prevented by our will,) and when of 

 animals, we put to the account of that universal wizard called instinct. Here 

 are a few examples. You speak of an innate instinct when the hound follows the 

 track of the game, which his extremely keen sense of smell makes him discover; 

 you justly deny this action of the dog to be an entirely voluntary one, caused 

 by reflection. When, your stomach being empty, the delicious odor of a savory 

 meal engenders in you an appetite — that is to say, literally, a desire for that 

 meal, and you satisfy this desire ; when the drunkard, seduced by the vapors 

 of spirituous liquors, yields to the tempting odor, in spite of all his good deter- 

 minations and of energetic exertions of the will to prevent it, and satisfies what 

 he emphatically calls his thirst, I do not see what difiFerence there is from a 

 physiological point of view between your and the drunkard's case and that of 



