No More Learning

The healthiest
among us is not exempt from hereditary disease. The most symmetrical,
athletic, and longlived is a being inexpressibly inferior to what he
would have been, had not the unnatural habits of his ancestors
accumulated for him a certain portion of malady and deformity. In the
most perfect specimen of civilized man, something is still found wanting
by the physiological critic. Can a return to nature, then,
instantaneously eradicate predispositions that have been slowly taking
root in the silence of innumerable ages? --Indubitably not. All that I
contend for is, that from the moment of the relinquishing all unnatural
habits no new disease is generated; and that the predisposition to
hereditary maladies gradually perishes, for want of its accustomed
supply. In cases of consumption, cancer, gout, asthma, and scrofula,
such is the invariable tendency of a diet of vegetables and pure water.

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 breaking
through a pernicious habit resolutely and at once. Dr. Trotter asserts
that no drunkard was ever reformed by gradually relinquishing his dram.
(See Trotter on the Nervous Temperament. ) 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 such 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 to be dreaded than death itself. He will escape
the epidemic madness, which 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.
These 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 sympathizing with the
disappointment of this venerable debauchee.