intimately mixed with the experiences of life by association and thus
acquire an emotional significance which is often very considerable. Their
emotional force, it may well be, is connected with the fact that their
anatomical seat is the most ancient part of the brain. They lie in a
remote almost disused storehouse of our minds and show the fascination or
the repulsiveness of all vague and remote things. It is for this reason
that they are--to an extent that is remarkable when we consider that they
are much more precise than touch sensations--subject to the influence of
emotional associations. The very same odor may be at one moment highly
pleasant, at the next moment highly unpleasant, in accordance with the
emotional attitude resulting from its associations. Visual images have no
such extreme flexibility; they are too definite to be so easily
influenced. Our feelings about the beauty of a flower cannot oscillate so
easily or so far as may our feelings about the agreeableness of its odor.
Our olfactory experiences thus institute a more or less continuous series
of by-sensations accompanying us through life, of no great practical
significance, but of considerable emotional significance from their
variety, their intimacy, their associational facility, their remote
ancestral reverberations through our brains.

It is the existence of these characteristics--at once so vague and so
specific, so useless and so intimate--which led various writers to
describe the sense of smell as, above all others, the sense of
imagination. No sense has so strong a power of suggestion, the power of
calling up ancient memories with a wider and deeper emotional
reverberation, while at the same time no sense furnishes impressions which
so easily change emotional color and tone, in harmony with the recipient's
general attitude. Odors are thus specially apt both to control the
emotional life and to become its slaves. With the use of incense religions
have utilized the imaginative and symbolical virtues of fragrance. All the
legends of the saints have insisted on the odor of sanctity that exhales
from the bodies of holy persons, especially at the moment of death. Under
the conditions of civilization these primitive emotional associations of
odor tend to be dispersed, but, on the other hand, the imaginative side of
the olfactory sense becomes accentuated, and personal idiosyncrasies of
all kinds tend to manifest themselves in the sphere of smell.