erience comes to us and is
recorded without our having consciousness of anything of the kind
going on. It is probable that the world of smells in which a dog with
a fine olfactive sense lives, produces little or nothing in the dog's
mind which is equivalent to our conscious perception of degrees of
agreeable and disagreeable odours. The dog is simply attracted and
repulsed in this direction and in that by the operation of his
olfactive organs, without, so to speak, giving any attention to the
sensation which is guiding him or being "aware" of it. No doubt at
times, and with special intensities of smell, he is, in his way,
conscious of a specific sensation. It is probable that whilst man's
general acuteness in perceiving and discriminating smells has dwindled
(as has that of the apes) in comparison with what it was in his remote
animal ancestry, yet he retains a large inherited capacity of
unconscious smell-sense, which most of us are unable to recognise,
although it is there, operating in ourselves unknown to us and
unobserved. The consciousness of smell-sensations is what we value and
talk of. It does not extend to the more primal smell-excitations,
except in extraordinary individuals. Thus, it seems to be not
improbable that we are attracted or repelled by other human
individuals by the unconscious operation upon us of attractive or
repulsive odours, and that the unaccountable liking or disliking which
we sometimes experience in regard to other individuals is due to
perfumes and odours emanating from such persons, which act upon us
through our olfactory organs without our being conscious of the fact.
It seems that we can thus arrive at a probable explanation of the
universality of the habit of kissing, and of "what is that thing we
call a kiss." It is not consciously used among civilised populations
as a deliberate attempt to smell the person kissed, but it
nevertheless serves to allow the unconscious exercise of
smell-preference, testing, and selection, with which are mingled, more
or less frequently, moments of conscious appreciation of the complex
of odours appertaining as an individual quality to the person kissed.

CHAPTER XII

LAUGHTER

The ancients associated laughter with the New Year. I am not sure
whether or no it is of good omen to begin the New Year with laughter.
Omens are such tricky things that I have given up paying any attention
to them. One would think it might be held to be unlucky to st