Taste

Use in the book

The Aristotelian report transmitted under Didymus states that tasting takes place through an intervening medium of tastable liquids. The following discussion pairs taste with touch: in both, the medium goes unnoticed because the distance involved is short, unlike the distances of sight, hearing, and smell. The two notices together make the apparently immediate character of tasting compatible with mediation.

Places to read

1. I.55.1Liquids provide the intervening medium.
2. I.56.1.2A short distance makes mediation in taste and touch unnoticed.

Translation in this edition

“Taste” names the act or faculty, while “tastable” marks its object. The terse first notice is not expanded into a taxonomy of flavors absent from the preserved text.

Use in the book

The distinction between taste and charm says one can be enlivened, dazzled and impressed without savoring an author. A corresponding inquiry asks how far taste’s jurisdiction extends in works of mind. Its continuation limits taste to flavors and what corresponds to them, leaving other matters to judgment properly so called. Later taste is the bond of soul and body and requires imagination, just as cold judgment requires memory. The shifts suggest several ways of locating taste among other powers rather than one fixed psychological diagram. Bad taste is also defined by its object: it loves what is not lovable, so sincerity or intensity of liking does not alone vindicate it.

Places to read

1. II, p. 649, entry 2, ¶2Admiration and dazzlement are distinguished from savoring.
2. II, p. 536, entry 7, ¶1Taste’s jurisdiction is questioned.
3. II, p. 537, entry 1, ¶1Flavors and their analogues mark a proposed limit to taste.
4. II, p. 804, entry 7, ¶1Imagination is necessary to taste as memory is to judgment.
5. I, p. 466, entry 1, ¶1Bad taste concerns loving an unlovable object.

Translation in this edition

The English translation uses savor for goûter to keep its relation to goût audible. Charm and admiration remain separate. The limitation in II.537 is a notebook assertion, not an editorial license to exclude all intellectual matters from aesthetics.

Use in the book

To study a subject is not necessarily to taste it. The end sought determines the quality of intellectual enjoyment: information gathered for prestige differs from knowledge that opens divine ways and the world’s value. Traherne’s taste is consequently trained by purpose, not simply by accumulating facts.

Corrupt custom can destroy relish for common blessings, while grace corrects the perversity that undervalues spiritual goods once they are known. Tasting therefore joins understanding to affection. The closing insistence that the soul must think, taste, and see makes enjoyment an exercise, not a possession acquired once for all. It remains possible to be surrounded by beauty while living in desolation because no active response answers it.

Places to read

1. III.13Corrupt social values prevent a taste for natural excellence.
2. III.41The palate of study varies with the learner’s purpose.
3. III.81Grace corrects the taste that undervalues divine mysteries.
4. IV.95Thinking, tasting, and seeing are necessary exercises of the soul.

In this edition

Taste and tincture in III.36 describes an initial experience and colouring of education, not necessarily a fully developed critical judgment. Elsewhere palate deliberately keeps the bodily analogy vivid.

Use in the book

Theophrastus says Empedocles supplies no separate account of how or through what taste occurs, beyond the common rule of fitting passages. He later questions how effluence could account for taste and touch, and treats flavours already present in tasting as making the sense duller rather than strengthening it.

Aristotle's A94 excerpt attributes to Empedocles the claim that kinds of flavour exist in water but are imperceptible through smallness. This is genuine further evidence about taste-objects, yet it is not by itself the missing account of an entire sensory mechanism. The opening proposition “taste is a kind of touch” is Aristotle's framing, not explicitly a doctrine assigned to Empedocles. The notices therefore supplement one another without cancelling Theophrastus's stated gap or warranting the transfer of every Aristotelian sentence to his predecessor.

Places to read

1. A 86 § 9 (testimony)Theophrastus, On the Senses 9. Records no separate mechanism for taste beyond fitting.
2. A 86 §§ 18–19 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 19. Uses pre-existing flavours as an impediment to clear tasting.
3. A 86 §§ 20–21 (polemical)2Theophrastus, On the Senses 20. Questions the application of effluence to taste and touch.
4. A 94 (testimony)Aristotle, On Sense and Sense-Objects. Attributes imperceptibly small kinds of flavour in water to Empedocles.

Translation in this edition

The edition says A94 “fills the gap” noted by Theophrastus. More cautiously, it adds a claim about the presence of flavours, without supplying all the causal detail the critic says is absent.