Must we count among the number of voluntary mutilations, the religious mortifications or macerations by which the devout manifest their piety? If it can be proved that such practices are injurious to health, it is certain that they should be condemned from a moral point of view. But if they are nothing more than self-imposed privations of pleasure, no one can disapprove of them. For man is always permitted to give up this or that pleasure. Thus abstention from animal-flesh which the school of Pythagoras taught its adepts, can not be considered contrary to the duty of self-preservation, as long as it cannot be demonstrated that this diet is unfavorable to health. Besides, this duty not to injure one's health, must itself be understood in a large and general sense. Otherwise, taken too strictly, it would become a narrow and selfish preoccupation, unworthy of man. One should select and regularly observe such diet as, from general or personal experience, would seem most suitable to the preservation of health; but, this principle once established, precautions too minute and circumspect lower man in the estimation of others, and, if nothing more, give him a tinge of the ridiculous, which he ought to avoid. One should therefore not take as a model the Italian Cornaro, who had a pair of scales at his meals to weigh his food and drink, although this method, it is said, prolonged his life to a hundred years. The learned Kant himself, although he was very high-minded, carried the rules he had laid down for his health to extravagant minuteness. For example, in order to spare his chest, he had made it a rule, never to breathe through his mouth when in the street, and, to faithfully observe this rule, he always walked alone, so as not to be obliged to speak. Care carried to such minute details falls into a sort of littleness very unbecoming a being destined for higher thoughts than mere physical self-preservation. One may say of such exaggerated prudence what Rousseau, though most inappropriately, said of medicine: "It prevents illness less than it inspires us with the fear of it; it does not so much ward off death as it gives us beforehand a taste of it; it wears life out instead of prolonging it; and even if it did prolong it, it would still be to the prejudice of the race, since it takes us away from society by the cares it lays upon us, and from our duties by the fear it inspires us with."[93] But, if too minute attention to health is not to be recommended, one cannot be too observant, within a reasonable measure, of course, of the obligation to follow a sensible and moderate diet, which is as favorable to the mind as it is to the body. Hygiene, in this respect, forms no inconsiderable part of morals.