2619. This digestion consequently reduces the (animal) food to the signification of the plant. Gastric digestion is a process of vegetable germination. The salivary process is a reduction to the animal death, digestion a reduction of this dead something itself to a lower kingdom.
2620. The gastric juice alone, like an acid, effects the solution of the aliment; with this, the movement of the gastric walls, which only tends to produce an easier mixture of the alimentary particles, having nothing to do.
Hunger.
2621. Through the digestive process the gastric juice is consumed by the food, and the stomach deoxydized. If there is a deficiency of dephlegmatizing and deoxydizing aliments, then the peroxydation of the stomach must produce a feeling—called appetite. If this be not appeased, the oxygenic tension in the stomach is elevated or increased, and then begins to become unpleasant; this is Hunger.
2622. Here the feeling of the stomach's peroxydation is an obstructed process of fermentation, dependent upon want of food and alkaline principles.
Thirst.
2623. The feeling of the reverse condition to the above is Thirst. It originates through a too rapid deoxydation of the stomach, through deglutition of the gastric juice on account of an excess of food. But it may also originate from a deficiency of gastric juice, or from an alkaline tendency in the latter; just as hunger resulted from a superabundance of gastric juice, or a disposition to form acids.
2624. Thirst is the feeling of too powerful a digestion, or of too rapid fermentation, whereby the product or leaven of the latter becomes, as it were, bankrupt; upon this the blood flows in greater quantity, in order to secrete the gastric juice; the arterial nature becomes elevated, and finally, an inflammatory condition, associated with a sense of dryness, originates, and is propagated as far as the mouth.
2625. Thirst and heat rank, like hunger and cold, parallel to each other. The feeling of dryness appears as heat, that of moisture, as cold. Cold therefore at once extinguishes or quenches the thirst; but produces hunger, which again is mitigated by heat.
Biliary Digestion.