July 23.
I will go home, be true to the spirit with the help of God, and wait for further light and strength.... I feel that I cannot live at this place as I would. This is not the place for my soul.... My life is not theirs. They have been the means of giving me much light on myself, but I feel I would live and progress more in a different atmosphere.
[It is interesting to note that after his return home he continued the diet which was used at Fruitlands. The account of his life states: “One of the first noteworthy things revealed by the diary, which from this time on was kept with less regularity than before,—is that Isaac not only maintained his abstemious habits after his return, but increased their vigor.”]
August 30.
If the past nine months or more are any evidence, I find that I can live on very simple diet—grains, fruit, and nuts. I have just commenced to eat the latter; I drink pure water. So far I have had wheat ground and made into unleavened bread, but as soon as we get in a new lot, I shall try it in the grain.
Hecker had evidently at this time a practical conviction of the truth of a principle which, in after years, he repeated in the form of a maxim of the Transcendentalists: “A gross feeder will never be a central thinker.” It is a truth of the spiritual no less than of the intellectual order. A little later we come upon the following profession of a vegetarian faith:—