Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/351

 A CLASSIFICATION OF FEELINGS. 339 diminished. Smell arises much more rapidly than taste. Unless the sapid substance is unusually pungent or in strong solution, there is not usually any feeling of taste until it has been for some moments in the mouth. Often there is a very distinct interval before taste begins. It is difficult to see any adequate cause for this delay other than the neces- sity of the sapid substance to penetrate through a certain thickness of tissue before it can reach the nerves of taste ; and this penetration or soaking of course requires time. Xo such delay occurs in the case of smell. In children, in whom the mucous membrane of the mouth is thinner than it is in adults, the feeling of taste arises much more readily, but no such difference exists in the case of smell. The pure tastes of sweetness, sourness, and bitterness, depend on the action of crystallisable substances, that is, of substances whose distinguishing physical property is the readiness with which they pass through organic membranes. Xo such peculiarity characterises the bodies that elicit the sense of smell. Order II. TJie correspondence is indirect. The second order of environmentally-initiated feelings is that in which the state in the organism which we call feeling corresponds, not with the actual operation of an agent upon the surface of the organism, but with the rela- tion which some circumstance in the environment bears to the organism. The action of the environment on the organism with which the feeling indirectly corresponds being not actual, but removed to a distance in time and space, there can arise in the organism no state answering to such action except by the extension of the correspondence in time and space, and this correspondence is intelligence. If the agent is not directly acting upon the organism, but the feeling corresponds with the relation in which the agent stands to the organism, then for the feeling to arise this relation must first be known. As far as concerns any effect upon the organism, an unperceived relation is nothing. Hence, of feelings of this order cognition forms a part ; a subordinate part indeed, but one of integral and even ante- cedent necessity. So far from being, like feelings of the previous order, unconditional, they are absolutely conditional on a previous process of cognition. A difference in the subjective aspect of the two orders of feelings is also im- portant. The Sensations that have been considered have no inherent quality of pleasurableness or painfulness. Each may be pleasurable under some circumstances, painful under others. The quality of the feeling, when it exists, corres-