much in the same way as some animals possess the sense of sight only as a vague consciousness of a distinction between the dangerous and dangerless. In this comparative obscurity of the sense of smell, Aristotle has recourse to taste as a percipient faculty of not uncognate character and much more fully understood. Taste and smell indeed present to Aristotle's mind a constant parallel to one another. The object of both is a combination of the moist and dry: but while flavour is contained in water only, the object of smell or odour exists at once in air and water. Odour in fact belongs to what is dry, just as flavour belongs to what is moist': and the object of smell is thus said to be a dryness which holds taste or sap within it (ἔγχυμος ξηρότης). The popular account of odour as a smoke-like exhalation (καπνώδης αναθυμίασις) Aristotle views as on the whole untenables. Such an exhalation cannot possibly exist in water, and it is in water to a great extent that smells come to be perceived. The organ and the medium of smell are closely in accordance with this quality of odours. Air and water may both serve as media. An object in short is perceived as odorous in so far as it is adapted to 'rinse out' as it were the taste-like dryness which constitutes as we have seen the general character of smell". This would seem to be a result which both air and water are able to perform: and the question therefore arises, what is the common characteristic present at once in air and water which makes them thus to disseminate and transmit the fragrant qualities of body? To this question Aristotle has no definite answer to give us. In one passage he speaks of this common quality as something 'nameless,' nor do we elsewhere find any more satisfactory answer. The organ of smell is 1 4226, ἔστι δ' ἡ ὀσμὴ τοῦ ξηροῦ, ὥσπερ ὁ χυμὸς τοῦ ὑγροῦ. 2 De Sensu, 5, 443 7. 3 Ibid, 5, 443 21. No doubt in c. 2, 43824 we have ǹd ỏσμǹ katvwôns tis tori ȧvalvulaois asserted as the ground for referring the organ of smell to fire, but the passage in question seems a mere hypothesis to shew how on the popular assumption that each sense corresponds to some element or other, smell would have to be referred to fire. See Bäumker, p. 47, who in 16 reads pavepòv ws ei deî. 4 De An. 4218. 5 De Sensu, 44229, πλυντικὸν ἡ ῥυπτικὸν ἐγχύμου ξηρότητος. • De An. 11. 7, 9, 419 32. represented as corresponding with the media that communicate the qualities of odour. It is therefore composed of air and water, and it cannot act except we simultaneously draw in the breath if we exhale or restrain the breath, smell cannot operate1. The sense which has been just described stands midway between the elementary sensations with which we started and those sense-functions which remain to be discussed. While touch and taste act apparently by actual contact, odours are perceived by the intervention of some medium or other—a mode of operation which is still more prominent in sight and hearing. And while touch and taste are indispensable conditions of animal existence, the sense of smell is almost as it were a luxury in life-an appendage to the faculties which are essential to vitality itself. Still more is this true of the two remaining senses. Sight and hearing play an important part in our higher cognitive development. But they do so to different degrees. Sight, as the sense which reveals the greatest number of differences in objects, is indeed directly the most intellectual sense: but hearing, by the knowledge which it brings of others' minds, is incidentally the most important factor in our spiritual knowledge: so that, adds Aristotle, the blind are generally more intelligent than the deaf". Hearing is discussed by Aristotle with less detail than the importance of the sense itself would seem to merit. It would almost seem, in fact, as if, as Trendelenburg suggests, the Treatise on Sense had lost a section which would have explained the character of sound and hearing in accordance with the statement of the Genesis of Animals*. But at the same time Aristotle's analysis of hearing and its object is comparatively full. The real object of hearing, Aristotle would seem to hold, is that vibration of the air which we describe as sound or noise. 1 4255; 42114. * De Sensu, 1, 437 16, διόπερ φρονιμώτεροι οἱ τυφλοὶ τῶν ἐνεῶν καὶ κωφῶν. De Gen. Animal. v. 7, 78623; 788*34. Hence then it is air which forms the essential element in enabling us to hear. "Every object so constituted as to set in movement the air extending continuously in one stream until it reach the hearing is sonorous'." Air then is the medium of sound: and hearing is the result of a movement in the air within the ear communicated by a movement of the air which lies outside. Closely connected with this is the explanation Aristotle gives of the distinction between high notes and low. High or sharp notes, he explains, are those which move the sense of hearing to a great extent within a short period of time-that is they are those which offer a great number of vibrations: low notes on the contrary are those which move the ear but slightly in a larger space of time-that is they are those which present a less number of vibrations. Shortly in fact high notes are the result of rapid, low or grave notes the result of slow vibrations. But perhaps the most interesting section of Aristotle's chapter on hearing is the distinction which he draws between mere sound or noise and actual speech. Mere sound, he points out, may be made by the tongue and in other ways: for voice, on the contrary, the organ striking must be animate and accompanied by some mental image (μerà pavτaoías τivos): voice being in fact sound possessed of meaning (ψόφος σημαντικός). Sight', as might be expected from the important place it occupies in the economy of knowledge, is discussed by Aristotle at greater length than any of the other senses. Beside the chapter devoted to it in the Psychology itself, it occupies the greater portion of the Treatise on the Senses, and there is a special Tractate on the collection of qualities which constitute its object 1 4203. De An. II. 8, 420b3. Cp. Timaeus, 67 B, öλws μèv ovv øwvyv Oŵμev Tǹv di' wtwr ὑπ' ἀέρος ἐγκεφάλου τε καὶ αἵματος μέχρι ψυχῆς πληγὴν διαδιδομένην, τὴν δὲ ὑπ ̓ αὐτῆς κίνησιν, ἀπὸ τῆς κεφαλῆς μὲν ἀρχομένην, τελευτώσαν δὲ περὶ τὴν τοῦ ἥπατος ἕδραν, ἀκοήν· ὅση δ ̓ αὐτῆς ταχεῖα, ὀξείαν, ὅση δὲ βραδυτέρα, βαρυτέραν. 3 11. 8, 42031. Cp. and contrast Polit. 1. 1, 1253*10 where Aristotle distinguishes between φωνή and λόγος: ἡ μὲν οὖν φωνὴ τοῦ λυπηροῦ καὶ ἡδεός ἐστι σημεῖον· ὁ δὲ λόγος ἐπὶ τῷ δηλοῦν ἐστι τὸ συμφέρον καὶ τὸ βλαβερόν. 4 De An. 11. 7; De Sensu, 2. 3. -viz. colour (TEρì xρwμȧтwv). Colour itself is a secondary quality (to adopt Locke's phraseology) which has the power of throwing the actually pellucid into movement': for it is this excitation of the pellucid or diaphanous and no material emanation (amóppoia) which explains the visibility of colour. What then, we have to ask, is this pellucid (Siapavés)? It is that which is not visible by itself but becomes visible only through a foreign colour (di ảλλóтρiov xрŵμа). So, for instance, air or water are pellucid: they are so, because apart from their specific properties they contain the same quality as inheres within the upper air or aether: pellucidity in fact is an attribute of no definite body or elements except the aether. Now this pellucid substance is, as potential, colourless, and dark: it becomes actual through fire or some such agency. But this presence of fire in the pellucid is just what produces light, just as its absence on the other hand produces darkness. Light therefore may itself be defined as the actual expression or full play of the pellucid as pellucid: practically we may describe light as the colour of the pellucid. Colour then is the quality which sets the actually pellucid into motion: so that since this actually pellucid matter is so actual by means of light, it follows that colour is not visible without the help of light— light, that is to say, is a condition of vision. This account of colour cannot certainly be said to be distinguished by lucidity. At times it seems a mere see-saw between two terms-colour and pellucidity-which are made in turn to explain each other. But we shall not perhaps be misrepresenting Aristotle's doctrine if we regard colour as an intensification of light. This view of colour seems at least to correspond with Aristotle's second definition. Colour, he says, is the limit of the pellucid, the increased expression of transparency which shews itself upon the surface of a body. So understood, colour at once gives us two primary hues-white 1 418831, πᾶν δὲ χρῶμα κινητικόν ἐστι τοῦ κατ' ἐνέργειαν διαφανούς. Cp. 41999. and black-corresponding to the light and shade which play upon the surfaces of substances-and from these two primary colours all the others may easily be derived. Into the manner in which Aristotle conceives the other colours to be formed from this primary white and black it would be out of place to enter here. But the student of the physics of Aesthetics will find much that will repay him in the pages of the Tract on Sense which discuss this subject, and may find some similarity between the theories there enunciated and those of Goethe's Farbenlehre. The media by which the qualities of coloured objects are transmitted need not detain us long. Air and water are the two which Aristotle enunciates. They act as such in virtue of that pellucid quality which they share in common with the upper aether. At the same time they are themselves colourless and thus well adapted by their neutral character to transmit the colours of material objects. Aristotle accordingly rejects entirely that theory of sensible emanations with which he has been sometimes so strangely credited. Rather in fact he may be thought to have anticipated in some respects the undulatory theory of light and vision. But the perceptive The organ of sight is of course the eye. power is not located in the external organ. reference to the heart which we will notice afterwards, it is particularly the inner chamber or kop which receives the impressions transmitted by the intervening medium from the coloured object'. The internal substance of the eye is therefore composed of water, a view corroborated empirically by the fact that when the eye is injured water is seen to gush forth from it. But Aristotle's analysis of the visual organ does not end with this description of it as composed of water. He explains that this water is produced by the brain, and refers to various ducts (Topo) by which it is conveyed to the inner chamber of 1 De Part. An. II. 8, 653b25; Hist. An. I. 8, 49tbzo, rò 8 ĖTÒs Tôi ở Đà Nôi, τὸ μὲν ὑγρόν, ᾧ βλέπει, κορή. 2 De Sensu, 2, 43805, καὶ εὐλόγως τὸ ἐντός ἐστιν ὕδατος· διαφανὲς γὰρ τὸ ὕδωρ, τὸ δὲ περὶ τοῦτο μέλαν, τὸ δ' ἐκτὸς τούτου λευκόν. |
