4. That the sensations of Taste recur in thought, when the sensation no longer exists, is a point of every man's experience. This recurring, in thought, of the feeling which we have by the sense, when the feeling by the sense is gone, is the idea of that feeling, the secondary state of consciousness, as we named it above.[18] That we can distinguish a very { 56} great number of tastes, and distinguish them accurately, is proof that we have a vast number of distinct ideas of taste; because, for the purpose of making such distinction, we have just seen that there must be a sensation and an idea; the sensation of the present object, and the idea of the sensation of each of the other objects from which we distinguish it. You have tasted port wine, and you have tasted claret; when you taste claret again, you can distinguish it from port wine; that is, you have the idea of the taste of port wine, in conjunction with the sensation of claret. You call it bad claret. Why? Because, along with the present taste, you have the idea of another, which, when it was sensation, was more agreeable than the present sensation.
[Bain's footnote 18: Discrimination and Retentiveness (the having of Ideas as the produce of Sensations) are different functions, although mutually involved, and, in all likelihood, developed in proportionate degrees in the same organ. We begin by discriminating changes of impression; this process is necessary in order to our having even a sensation; the more delicate the discriminating power, the greater the number of our primary sensations. He that can discriminate twenty shades of yellow has twenty sensations of yellow; the two statements express the same fact. These various sensations being often repeated, acquire at last an ideal persistence; they can be maintained as ideas, without the originals. The function or power of the Intellect whereby they are thus rendered self-subsisting as ideas, is not the same function as discrimination; we call it Memory, Retentiveness, Adhesiveness, Association, and so on. What may be affirmed about it, on the evidence of induction, is, that where discrimination is good, memory or retentiveness is also good. The discriminative eye for colour is accompanied with a good memory for colour; the musical ear is both discriminative and retentive.--_B._]
