“A man who lives in pleasure [_i.e._, in selfish luxury] is dead while he lives, for he lives only to his belly. In his other senses he lives not. He sees not what he ought to see; he hears not what he ought to hear; he speaks not what he ought to speak.... Look not at the superficial countenance, but examine the interior, and you will see it full of deep dejection. If it were possible to bring the soul into view, and to behold it with our bodily eyes, that of the luxurious would seem depressed, mournful, miserable, and wasted with leanness, for the more the body grows sleek and gross, the more lean and weakly is the soul. The more the one is pampered, the more is the other hampered [θάλπεται--θάπτεται: the latter meaning, literally, buried]. As when the pupil of the eye has the external envelope too thick, it cannot put forth the power of vision and look out, because the light is excluded by the dense covering, and darkness ensues; so when the body is constantly full fed, the soul must be invested with grossness. The dead, say you, corrupt and rot, and a foul pestilential humour distils from them. So in her who lives in pleasure may be seen rheums, and phlegm, and catarrh, hiccough, vomiting, eructations, and the like, which, as too unseemly, I forbear to name. For such is the despotism of luxury, it makes us endure things which we do not think proper even to mention.... “‘She that lives in pleasure is dead while she lives.’ Hear this, ye women[95] who pass your time in revels and intemperance, and who neglect the poor, pining and perishing with hunger, whilst you are destroying yourselves with continual luxury. Thus you are the cause of two deaths--of those who are dying of want and of your own, both through ill-measure. If, out of your fulness, you tempered their want, you would save two lives. Why do you thus gorge your own body with excess, and waste that of the poor with want? Consider what comes of food--into what it is changed. Are you not disgusted at its being named? Why, then, be eager for such accumulations? The increase of luxury is but the multiplication of filth.[96] For Nature has her limits, and what is beyond these is not nourishment, but injury and the increase of ordure.