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.
Rousseau (in _Emile_, Bk. II) regarded smell as the sense of the
imagination. So, also, at an earlier period, it was termed
(according to Cloquet) by Cardano. Cloquet frequently insisted on
the qualities of odors which cause them to appeal to the
imagination; on their irregular and inconstant character; on
their power of intoxicating the mind on some occasions; on the
curious individual and racial preferences in the matter of odors.
He remarked on the fact that the Persians employed asafoetida as
a seasoning, while valerian was accounted a perfume in antiquity.
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