Lilura
"After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness...
...All these kinds of perception I will illustrate by examples. By hearsay I know the day of my birth, my parentage, and other matters about which I have never felt any doubt. By mere experience I know that I shall die, for this I can affirm from having seen that others like myself have died, though all did not live for the same period, or die by the same disease. I know by mere experience that oil has the property of feeding fire, and water of extinguishing it. In the same way I know that a dog is a barking animal, man a rational animal, and in fact nearly all the practical knowledge of life.
...We deduce one thing from another as follows: when we clearly perceive that we feel a certain body and no other, we thence clearly infer that the mind is united to the body, and that their union is the cause of the given sensation; but we cannot thence absolutely understand the nature of the sensation and the union...
But as men at first made use of the instruments supplied by nature to accomplish very easy pieces of workmanship, laboriously and imperfectly, and then, when these were finished, wrought other things more difficult with less labour and greater perfection; and so gradually mounted from the simplest operations to the making of tools, and from the making of tools to the making of more complex tools, and fresh feats of workmanship, till they arrived at making, complicated mechanisms which they now possess. So, in like manner, the intellect, by its native strength, makes for itself intellectual instruments, whereby it acquires strength for performing other intellectual operations, and from these operations again fresh instruments, or the power of pushing its investigations further, and thus gradually proceeds till it reaches the summit of wisdom.
...For instance, in the same way as we are unable, while we are thinking, to feign that we are thinking or not thinking, so, also, when we know the nature of body we cannot imagine an infinite fly; or, when we know the nature of the soul, [z] we cannot imagine it as square, though anything may be expressed verbally. But, as we said above, the less men know of nature the more easily can they coin fictitious ideas, such as trees speaking, men instantly changed into stones, or into fountains, ghosts appearing in mirrors, something issuing from nothing, even gods changed into beasts and men and infinite other absurdities of the same kind.
Some persons think, perhaps, that fiction is limited by fiction, and not by understanding; in other words, after I have formed some fictitious idea, and have affirmed of my own free will that it exists under a certain form in nature, I am thereby precluded from thinking of it under any other form.
...To take an example. Supposing that a man has never reflected, taught by experience or by any other means, that our senses sometimes deceive us, he will never doubt whether the sun be greater or less than it appears. Thus rustics are generally astonished when they hear that the sun is much larger than the earth. But from reflection on the deceitfulness of the senses doubt arises, and if, after doubting, we acquire a true knowledge of the senses, and how things at a distance are represented through their instrumentality, doubt is again removed.
...Lastly, let us also beware of another great cause of confusion, which prevents the understanding from reflecting on itself. (2) Sometimes, while making no distinction between the imagination and the intellect, we think that what we more readily imagine is clearer to us; and also we think that what we imagine we understand. Thus, we put first that which should be last: the true order of progression is reversed, and no legitimate conclusion is drawn."
- Spinoza, from his writings "On the Improvement of Understanding".
TL;DR I disagree with you about tastes being innate or inherent in whatever capacity. The human ability to reason, think, understand, and thus create doubt which is the seed of understanding is, at least according to Spinoza, "infinite".
Something as superfluous as "taste" has is of dubious quality when persons account themselves properly with exhaustive and expressive usage of all tools available to work and labor towards rationalism.
In any case "tastes" are good tools for preaching doubt in others. Where I would agree with you (although you didn't touch upon this specifically) is when the scenario involves two parties; one party of persons is objectively ignorant of topics (and thus filled with doubt) but is not only not interested in reasoning or understanding, the persons are interested only in transforming their own ignorance into a self-affirming parody of truth...
To steal my favorite dialog from Dostoyevsky's "Brothers Karamazov": (while the brother's Father is confessing his Sins in church the Priest muses) that in the Father's pathetic appropriation of his utter inability to to live in grace but rather having spent half his life or more becoming practised and skilled in everything a good man would avoid the Father character ruminates on these facts, on his life, and he tells the Priest that he can never change because he is this way and "less human" than others--
--the Priest thinks this is a Sin in the form of pride, and he hilariously (thinking ot himself) concludes that the Father's biggest flaw is the huge amount of pride he takes in being so "unique" in being so lost and dubs it "the Satanic Pride"... nothing to do with the devil, but with man. It's a simple and short scene early on but it sets the characterization for the brother's Father as if set in stone.
I couldn't really do it justice here paraphrasing it either.
