[140] He was at one time so corpulent that he could not get in and out of his carriage in visiting his patients at Bath.
[141] One of the many excellences of the non-flesh dietary is this essential quality of fruits and vegetables, that they contain in themselves sufficient liquid to allow one to dispense with a large proportion of all extraneous drinks, and certainly with all alcoholic kinds. Hence it is at once the easiest and the surest preventive of all excessive drinking. Much convincing testimony has been collected to this effect by the English and German Vegetarian Societies.
[142] It is neither necessary nor possible for everyone to practise so extreme abstemiousness; but it is instructive to compare it for a moment with the ordinary and prevalent indulgence in eating.
[143] A Life of George Cheyne, M.D., Parker and Churchill, 1846. See also Biog. Britannica.
[144] Dr. Samuel Johnson gave up wine by the advice of Cheyne, and drank tea with Mrs. Thrale and Boswell till he died, æt. 75.
[145] Bayle, the author of the great Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1690), to whom belongs the lasting honour of having inaugurated the critical method in history and philosophy, which has since led to such extensive and important results, seems also to have been the first explicitly to state the difficulties of that greatest crux of Theology—the problem of the existence, or rather dominance, of Evil. His rival Le Clerc, in his Bibliothéque, took up the orthodox cudgels. Lord Shaftesbury, the celebrated theologian and moralist, wrote his dialogue—The Moralists (1709)—in direct answer to Bayle, followed the next year by the Theodike or Vindication of the Deity of Leibnitz. Two of the most able and distinguished of the Anti-Optimists are Voltaire and Schopenhauer, the former of whom never wearies of using his unrivalled powers of irony and sarcasm on the Tout est Bien theory. As for the latter philosopher, he has carried his Anti-Optimism to the extremes of Pessimism.
[146] Pope here is scarcely logical upon his own premiss. It seems impossible, upon any grounds of reason or analogy, to deny to the lower animals a posthumous existence while vindicating it for ourselves, inasmuch as the essential conditions of existence are identical for many other beings. To the serious thinker the question of a post-terrestrial state of existence must stand or fall for both upon the same grounds. Yet what can well be more weak, or more of a subterfuge, than the pretence of many well-meaning persons, who seek to excuse their indifferentism to the cruel sufferings of their humble fellow-beings by the expression of a belief or a hope that there is a future retributive state for them? It must be added that this idle speculation—whether the non-human races are capable of post-terrestrial life or no—might, to any serious apprehension, seem to be wholly beside the mark. But what can be more monstrously ridiculous (γέλοιον, in Lucian’s language) than the inconsistency of those who would maintain the affirmative, and yet persist in devouring their clients? Risum teneatis, amici!
[147] Spence’s Anecdotes and The Guardian, May 21, 1713. His indignation was equally aroused by the tortures of the vivisectors of the day. And he demands how do men know that they have “a right to kill beings whom they [at least, the vast majority] are so little above, for their own curiosity, or even for some use to them.”
[148] See Travels, &c. Part IV.
[149] Dict. Phil., in article Viande, where it is lamented that his book, as far as appeared, had made no more converts than had the Treatise of Porphyry fifteen centuries before.