Page:Letters on the Human Body (John Clowes).djvu/94

74 same time, of their being in such continual requisition and use, that the gratitude, which they were intended to excite, is often buried in their enjoyment.

The general thoughtlessness of mankind, however, is no sufficient reason why you and I should cease to think, especially on a subject of so much real concern to our best happiness, and therefore, with your permission, I will continue my former remarks, by extending them to the two remaining bodily senses, viz. the smell and the touch.

Yet on the sense of smell I have little to observe, since it is so nearly connected with the sense of taste, treated of in my last letter, being itself a species of taste, but exercised on a more refined and delicate subject, and by a superior and more refined sensitive principle or organ. The difference, therefore, between the bodily senses of smelling and tasting, may perhaps best be described by the difference between the mental senses of perceiving and knowing, inasmuch as to perceive a truth is a more interior, and consequently more elevated, act of the mind than to know it. In other respects, however, the two senses are similar, each being in connection with interior mental principles, of which it is the ultimate basis, support, and representative figure, and each deriving its origin from the and ,