2819. The organs of defence are therefore an appendage of the sense of feeling, as are the bones of the motor system.
Splanchnic or Visceral Senses.
2820. These senses will not be found to disown their predecessors; and just as the latter extracted the qualities from terrestrial matter, so also do they. But while the former had to deal with the material, the present set will have to transact business with the spiritual qualities.
2. Function of the Gustatory Sense.
2821. Digestion is a chemical process, and one indeed wherein actual mixture and decomposition take place; it is therefore also, and "par excellence," an aqueous process. For matters that are actually decomposible are alone submitted to digestion, since it is of too coarse a character to perceive the proneness of such bodies to decomposition.
2822. It belongs only to a higher grade of perfection, or to a nervose condition of the digestive process, to perceive the rationale of the decomposition, or the spiritual conflict, which prevails between the matters, when they are about to separate.
2823. Now, the organ which only perceives the qualities of matters, without reference to their actual separation, is a sense. Upon the highest grade of perfection the digestive passes over into a sensorial function.
2824. Tasting is the first commencement of the digestion in the nervous system, where the aliments are felt just before the analysis into their polar quantities has taken place. The gustatory is a water-sense.
2825. For the exercise of the sense of taste the same conditions are requisite as for digestion, viz. solution and capacity for decomposition. Without the capacity for being dissolved, and without the occurrence of actual solution, nothing can be tasted, any more than digested. The saliva is the gastric juice for the tongue.
2826. If water be the basic element in the process of digestion, so in gustation must the higher water, or the salt, be the basis of taste. Salt alone is sapid, and every thing in order to be tasted, must possess saline properties.