Yes, Tommy, the statement IS "strongly worded" and while one might nitpick at it (I suppose) - to me it is (largely as you say or imply), correct. I am long since convinced that metaphysics, religion, myth, unbridled spec, "culture", paranormalcy and a host of other approaches to "knowledge" - are anything but - and are merely entertaining (for those easily entertained) examples of how we may use and abuse language and words....

You say: "It is absurd to suppose that the receptor end-organs of taste or of smell are supposed to give us a better report of states of affairs that those of hearing and sight just because the objects under scrutiny are usually closer to our sense organs of smell and taste."

I think what Gregory is trying to bring out here is not so much the propinquity (though that is part of it) but the fact that sight (and he says sound, too as I recall) require "imagery" or images in the brain and that it is these latter "images" we interpret and not the "primary" (imageless) stimuli such as those of taste and smell. (Obviously, I would think, he is not holding forth that the smell of a gardenia which might invoke an image of the high school prom, is at the same time THE image of "gardenia"... There is a difference).

But the sight of a shape "out there" beyond our bodies, is imaged as a cube in the mind and THAT (the image, not the stimuli) is what is then further processed and interpreted and what is taken to BE the shape out there... (something like that).