No More Learning

Newton's "Defence of
Vegetable Regimen", from whom I have borrowed this interpretation of the
fable of Prometheus.

'Making allowance for such transposition of the events of the allegory
as time might produce after the important truths were forgotten, which
this portion of the ancient mythology was intended to transmit, the
drift of the fable seems to be this:--Man at his creation was endowed
with the gift of perpetual youth; that is, he was not formed to be a
sickly suffering creature as we now see him, but to enjoy health, and to
sink by slow degrees into the bosom of his parent earth without disease
or pain. Prometheus first taught the use of animal food (primus bovem
occidit Prometheus (Plin. "Nat. Hist". lib. 7 sect. 57. )) and of fire,
with which to render it more digestible and pleasing to the taste.
Jupiter, and the rest of the gods, foreseeing the consequences of these
inventions, were amused or irritated at the short-sighted devices of the
newly-formed creature, and left him to experience the sad effects of
them. Thirst, the necessary concomitant of a flesh diet' (perhaps of all
diet vitiated by culinary preparation), 'ensued; water was resorted to,
and man forfeited the inestimable gift of health which he had received
from heaven: he became diseased, the partaker of a precarious existence,
and no longer descended slowly to his grave. ("Return to Nature".
Cadell, 1811. )

But just disease to luxury succeeds,
And every death its own avenger breeds;
The fury passions from that blood began,
And turned on man a fiercer savage--man.

Man, and the animals whom he has infected with his society, or depraved
by his dominion, are alone diseased.
The wild hog, the mouflon, the
bison, and the wolf; are perfectly exempt from malady, and invariably
die either from external violence or natural old age. But the domestic
hog, the sheep, the cow, and the dog, are subject to an incredible
variety of distempers; and, like the corruptors of their nature, have
physicians who thrive upon their miseries. The supereminence of man is
like Satan's, a supereminence of pain; and the majority of his species,
doomed to penury, disease, and crime, have reason to curse the untoward
event that, by enabling him to communicate his sensations, raised him
above the level of his fellow-animals. But the steps that have been
taken are irrevocable. The whole of human science is comprised in one
question:--How can the advantages of intellect and civilization be
reconciled with the liberty and pure pleasures of natural life? How can
we take the benefits and reject the evils of the system, which is now
interwoven with all the fibres of our being? --I believe that abstinence
from animal food and spirituous liquors would in a great measure
capacitate us for the solution of this important question.

It is true that mental and bodily derangement is attributable in part to
other deviations from rectitude and nature than those which concern
diet. The mistakes cherished by society respecting the connection of the
sexes, whence the misery and diseases of unsatisfied celibacy,
unenjoying prostitution, and the premature arrival of puberty,
necessarily spring; the putrid atmosphere of crowded cities; the
exhalations of chemical processes; the muffling of our bodies in
superfluous apparel; the absurd treatment of infants:--all these and
innumerable other causes contribute their mite to the mass of human
evil.

Comparative anatomy teaches us that man resembles frugivorous animals in
everything, and carnivorous in nothing; he has neither claws wherewith
to seize his prey, nor distinct and pointed teeth to tear the living
fibre. A Mandarin of the first class, with nails two inches long, would
probably find them alone inefficient to hold even a hare. After every
subterfuge of gluttony, the bull must be degraded into the ox, and the
ram into the wether, by an unnatural and inhuman operation, that the
flaccid fibre may offer a fainter resistance to rebellious nature. It is
only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that
it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion; and that the
sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable
loathing and disgust. Let the advocate of animal food force himself to a
decisive experiment on its fitness, and, as Plutarch recommends, tear a
living lamb with his teeth, and plunging his head into its vitals slake
his thirst with the steaming blood; when fresh from the deed of horror,
let him revert to the irresistible instincts of nature that would rise
in judgement against it, and say, 'Nature formed me for such work as
this. ' Then, and then only, would he be consistent.

Man resembles no carnivorous animal.