-ideal, and we shall grow
strong, resistant teeth once more, and the teething of our young will
not be the hell it is.

Teething is strictly the period when the voluntary center of the lower
plane first comes into full activity, and takes for a time the
precedence.

So, the mouth is the great sensual gate to the lower body. But let us
not forget it is also a gate by which we breathe, the gate through
which we speak and go impalpably forth to our object, the gate at
which we can kiss the pinched, delicate, spiritual kiss. Therefore,
although the main sensual gate of entrance to the lower body, it has
its reference also to the upper body.

Taste, the sense of taste, is an intake of a pure communication
between us and a body from the outside world. It contains the element
of touch, and in this it refers to the cardiac plexus. But taste,
_qua_ taste, refers purely to the solar plexus.

And then smell. The nostrils are the great gate from the wide
atmosphere of heaven to the lungs. The extreme sigh of yearning we
catch through the mouth. But the delicate nose advances always into
the air, our palpable communicator with the infinite air. Thus it has
its first delicate root in the cardiac plexus, the root of its intake.
And the root of the delicate-proud exhalation, rejection, is in the
thoracic ganglion. But the nostrils have their other function of
smell. Here the delicate nerve-ends run direct from the lower centers,
from the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion, or even deeper. There
is the refined sensual intake when a scent is sweet. There is the
sensual repudiation when a scent is unsavoury. And just as the
fullness of the lips and the shape of the mouth depend on the
development from the lower or the upper centers, the sensual or the
spiritual, so does the shape of the nose depend on the direct control
of the deepest centers of consciousness. A perfect nose is perhaps the
result of a balance in the four modes. But what is a perfect nose!--We
only know that a short snub nose goes with an over-sympathetic nature,
not proud enough; while a long nose derives from the center of the
upper will, the thoracic ganglion, our great center of curiosity, and
benevolent or objective control. A thick, squat nose is the
sensual-sympathetic nose, and the high, arched nose the sensual
voluntary nose, having the curve of repudiation, as when we turn up
our nose from a bad smell, but also the proud curve of haughtiness and
subjectiv