Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, Volume II

food, and says, when interpreted phyletically, " This is good enough to eat." The great epoch marked by the descent of fire and cooking not only economized digestion and freed its energy for higher uses, but evolved hearth, home, and mealtimes. From the standpoint of the higher metabolism, every cell and tissue has its own specific hunger, and what we call appetite is a symphony of many parts or a net algebraic result aggregated from the specified hunger of all the tissues and cells. There is a struggle for survival between the different organs of the same soma for the food supply which the blood contains, and sensation, and perhaps thought, are in one sense functions of nutrition. If the parts and molecules latest to develop and most distinctively human, being more complex than others, and being those which from their extreme instability are most labile, are broken down in the function of thought and feeling, we can well understand that the nervous system, which is the master tissue of the body, may be the seat of the highest complexity, where matter is most nearly transubstantiated into soul. Pleasure and pain are closely linked with satiety and hunger. Happiness or euphoria, which nearly every form of greeting in the world first inquires for when friends meet, on the one hand, and disease, the chief fear of man, which brings functions to consciousness that should remain submerged, morbidifies visceral sensations into hypochondria and darkens into melancholia with forced feeding, on the other, are the extremes between which every normal and happy life unfolds. Sleep builds up brain cells, and in anemia we live on a lower nutritive level.…