Time & Perspective Quote by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Brillat-Savarin is doing what the best gourmands always do: smuggling a philosophy of modernity into a seemingly modest “observation.” In that airy phrase “ethereal sense,” he elevates sight and touch from mere bodily utilities into refined instruments, as if the senses themselves have been educated by history. The line’s quiet confidence - “have from time acquired” - matters. He isn’t arguing; he’s naturalizing change, presenting sensory evolution as a cultural fact, the way one might note the rise of novels or the decline of Latin.

The subtext is political, even if it arrives dressed as physiology. Writing in a post-Enlightenment, post-Revolutionary Europe, Brillat-Savarin treats perception as something societies cultivate. Taste may be the obvious subject in his world, but here he nods to the senses that enable display, texture, and spectacle: the look of a table, the gleam of porcelain, the feel of linens, the choreography of serving. “Additional power” reads like a verdict on consumer culture before the term exists. When sight and touch gain power, the surface of things becomes a kind of authority.

His profession as a lawyer peeks through in the phrasing: careful, cumulative, quasi-testimonial. He “observes” like a witness, not a preacher. That restraint is the trick. By sounding clinical, he legitimizes pleasure as knowledge and suggests that refinement isn’t decadence but progress - a social skill built over time, with winners (those who can read these sensory codes) and, inevitably, those left outside the room.