and the souls
That, by the paths of an aspiring change,
Have reached thy haven of perpetual Peace,
There rest from the eternity of toil,
That framed the fabric of thy perfectness.”
From the Essay, in the form of a note, which he subjoined to the passage we have quoted, we extract the principal arguments:—
“Man, and the other animals whom he has afflicted with his malady or depraved by his dominion, are alone diseased. The Bison, the wild Hog, the Wolf, are perfectly exempt from malady, and invariably die either from external violence or from mature old age. But the domestic Hog, the Sheep, the Cow, the Dog, are subject to an incredible variety of distempers, and, like the corruptors of their nature, have physicians who thrive upon their miseries. The super-eminence of man is, like Satan’s, the super-eminence of pain; and the majority of his species, doomed to penury, disease, and crime, have reason to curse the untoward event that, by enabling him to communicate his sensations, raised him above the level of his fellow-animals. But the steps that have been taken are irrevocable. The whole of human science is comprised in one question: How can the advantages of intellect and civilisation be reconciled with the liberty and pure pleasures of natural life? How can we take the benefits and reject the evils of the system which is now interwoven with the fibre of our being? I believe that abstinence from animal food and spirituous liquors would, in a great measure, capacitate us for the solution of this important question.
“It is true that mental and bodily derangements are attributable, in part, to other deviations from rectitude and nature than those which concern diet. The mistakes cherished by society respecting the connexion of the sexes, whence the misery and diseases of unsatisfied celibacy, unenjoyed prostitution, and the premature arrival of puberty, necessarily spring. The putrid atmosphere of crowded cities, the exhalations of chemical processes, the muffling of our bodies in superfluous apparel, the absurd treatment of infants—all these, and innumerable other causes, contribute their mite to the mass of human evil.
“Comparative Anatomy teaches us that man resembles the frugivorous animals in everything, the carnivorous in nothing. He has neither claws wherewith to seize his prey, nor distinct and pointed teeth to tear the living fibre. A mandarin of the first class, with nails two inches long, would probably find them alone inefficient to hold even a hare. After every subterfuge of gluttony, the bull must be degraded into the “ox,” and the ram into the “wether,” by an unnatural and inhuman operation, that the flaccid fibre may offer a fainter resistance to rebellious nature. It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juice and raw horror does not excite loathing and disgust.
“Let the advocate of animal food force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and, as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth and, plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the streaming blood. When fresh from this deed of horror, let him revert to the irresistible instinct of nature that would rise in judgment against it and say, ‘Nature formed me for such work as this.’ Then, and then only would he be consistent.