emotional appreciation of the object may intervene between the stimulus
and the appropriate action, and even supplant it. In this way, vision
and hearing may free themselves from the merely practical and become
autonomous embodiments of feeling. The distance between the seen or
heard object and the body is important. The objects of touch and taste,
on the other hand, have to be brought into contact with the body; the
practical reaction then follows; there is no time during which it may
be suspended.

Important also, especially for the beauty of art, is our greater power
to control sensations of vision and hearing. Only colors and sounds
can be woven into complex and stable wholes. Tastes and odors, when
produced simultaneously or in succession, do not keep their distinctness
as colors and sounds do, but blur and interfere with each other. No
one, however ingenious, could construct a symphony of odors or a picture
of tastes. Nevertheless, the possibility of controlling colors and
sounds and of creating stable and public objects out of them, is only
a secondary reason for their aesthetic fitness. Even if one could
construct instruments for the orderly production of tastes and
odors--and simple instruments of this kind have been devised--one could
not make works of art out of them; for a succession of such sensations
would express nothing; they would still be utterly without meaning.
The fundamental reason for the superiority of sights and sounds is
their expressiveness, their connection with the life of feeling and
thought. They take root in the total self; whereas the other elements
remain, for the most part, on the surface.

Under favorable conditions, however, all sensations may enter into the
sthetic experience. Despite the close connection between the lower
senses and the impulses serving practical life, there is a certain