He rose and reigns in me.
—A. Irvine Innes, The Christian Register.
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Eastern Customs—See [Expectorating]; [Gestures and Uses of the Hands in the East]; [Tabooed Topics in the East].
Eating, a Guide in—See [Affluence, The Principle of].
EATING AND CHARACTER
Gluttony tends to cynicism. Coarseness and extravagance of speech and manners go hand in hand with dietetic excesses, as, for cognate reasons, the repulsiveness of voracious animals is generally aggravated by a want of cleanliness. Among the natives of the arctic regions, where climatic causes make gluttony a pandemic vice, personal cleanliness is an almost unknown virtue, and Kane’s anecdotes of polar household habits depict a degree of squalor that would appal a gorilla.
Habitual abstemiousness, on the other hand, is the concomitant of modesty, thrift, self-control, and evenness of temper, and is compatible with heroic perseverance, tho hardly with great energy of vital vigor. The dietetic self-denials of Luigi Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman of the sixteenth century, enabled him to outlive the third generation of his epicurean relatives. During the latter decades of his long life he boasts of having enjoyed a peace of mind unattainable by other means. Within the bounds of reason, occasional fasts are by no means incompatible with intellectual vigor, tho they are chiefly apt to stimulate the activity of abstruse speculations. There are intellectual voluptuaries whose enjoyment of mental triumphs in controversy or cogitation seem, for the time being, actually to deaden their craving for material food. Isaac Newton, on the track of a cosmic secret, would send back plate after plate of untasted meals. Percy Shelley, in the words of his sprightly biographer, indignantly refused to alloy the nectar of poetic inspiration with a “boarding-house soup,” and in his creative moods rarely answered a dinner call without a sigh of regret. Benedict Spinoza, amid the parchment piles of his bachelor den, would fast for days in the ecstacy of his “Gott trunken”—“God-intoxicated”—meditations. Intermittent denutrition undoubtedly tends to clear off the cobwebs of the brain. (Text.)—Felix Oswald, Open Court.
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ECCENTRICITY