A Vindication of Natural Diet.Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Philosophy
A Vindication of Natural Diet.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Vegetarianism
Those who may be induced by these remarks to give the vegetable system a
fair trial, should, in the first place, date the commencement of their
practice from the moment of their conviction. All depends upon the
breaking through a pernicious habit resolutely and at once. Dr.
Trotter[8] asserts that no drunkard was ever reformed by gradually
relinquishing his dram. Animal flesh, in its effects on the human
stomach, is analogous to a dram. It is similar in the kind, though
differing in the degree, of its operation. The proselyte to a pure diet
must be warned to expect a temporary diminution of muscular strength.
The subtraction of a powerful stimulus will suffice to account for this
event. But it is only temporary, and is succeeded by an equable
capability for exertion far surpassing his former various and
fluctuating strength. Above all, he will acquire an easiness of
breathing, by which the same exertion is performed with a remarkable
exemption from that painful and difficult panting now felt by almost
every one after hastily climbing an ordinary mountain. He will be
equally capable of bodily exertion or mental application after as before
his simple meal. He will feel none of the narcotic effects of ordinary
diet. Irritability, the direct consequence of exhausting stimuli, would
yield to the power of natural and tranquil impulses. He will no longer
pine under the lethargy of _ennui_, that unconquerable weariness of
life, more dreaded than death itself. He will escape the epidemic
madness that broods over its own injurious notions of the Deity, and
"realizes the hell that priests and beldams feign." Every man forms, as
it were, his god from his own character; to the divinity of one of
simple habits, no offering would be more acceptable than the happiness
of his creatures. He would be incapable of hating or persecuting others
for the love of God. He will find, moreover, a system of simple diet to
be a system of perfect epicurism. He will no longer be incessantly
occupied in blunting and destroying those organs from which he expects
his gratification.
The pleasures of taste to be derived from a dinner of potatoes, beans,
peas, turnips, lettuces, with a dessert of apples, gooseberries,
strawberries, currants, raspberries, and in winter, oranges, apples,
and pears, is far greater than is supposed. Those who wait until they
can eat this plain fare with the sauce of appetite will scarcely join
with the hypocritical sensualist at a lord mayor's feast, who declaims
against the pleasures of the table. Solomon kept a thousand concubines,
and owned in despair that all was vanity. The man whose happiness is
constituted by the society of one amiable woman would find some
difficulty in sympathising with the disappointment of this venerable
debauchee.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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