A Vindication of Natural Diet.Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Philosophy
A Vindication of Natural Diet.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Vegetarianism
dogmas, apparently favourable to the intolerant and angry passions,
should have alone been deemed essential; whilst Christians are in the
daily practice of all those habits which have infected with disease and
crime, not only the reprobate sons, but these favoured children of the
common Father's love. Omnipotence itself could not save them from the
consequences of this original and universal sin.
There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet
and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has
been fairly tried. Debility is gradually converted into strength,
disease into healthfulness: madness, in all its hideous variety, from
the ravings of the fettered maniac, to the unaccountable irrationalities
of ill-temper, that make a hell of domestic life, into a calm and
considerable evenness of temper, that alone might offer a certain pledge
of the future moral reformation of society. On a natural system of diet,
old age would be our last and our only malady: the term of our existence
would be protracted; we should enjoy life, and no longer preclude others
from the enjoyment of it; all sensational delights would be infinitely
more exquisite and perfect; the very sense of being would then be a
continued pleasure, such as we now feel it in some few and favoured
moments of our youth. By all that is sacred in our hopes for the human
race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth, to give a fair trial
to the vegetable system. Reasoning is surely superfluous on a subject
whose merits an experience of six months would set for ever at rest. But
it is only among the enlightened and benevolent that so great a
sacrifice of appetite and prejudice can be expected, even though its
ultimate excellence should not admit of dispute.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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