THE ETHICS OF DIET.

APPENDIX.

AT the present day, in all parts of the civilised world, the once orthodox practices of cannibalism and human sacrifice universally are regarded with astonishment and horror. The history of human development in the past, and the slow but sure progressive movements in the present time, make it absolutely certain that, with the same astonishment and horror will the now prevailing habits of living by the slaughter and suffering of the inferior species—habits different in degree rather than in kind from the old-world barbarism—be regarded by an age more enlightened and more refined than ours. Of such certainty no one, whose beau idéal of civilisation is not a State crowded with jails, penitentiaries, reformatories, and asylums, and who does not measure Progress by the imposing but delusive standard of an ostentatious Materialism—by the statistics of commerce, by the amount of wealth accumulated in the hands of a small part of the community, by the increase of populations which are mainly recruited from the impoverished classes, by the number and popularity of churches and chapels, or even by the number of school buildings and lecture halls, or the number and variety of charitable institutions throughout the country—will pretend to have any reasonable doubt.

In searching the records of this nineteenth century—the minutes and proceedings of innumerable learned and scientific societies, especially those of Social and Sanitary Science Congresses—our more enlightened descendants (let us suppose, of the 2001st century of the Christian era), it is equally impossible to doubt, will observe with amazement that, amid all the immeasurable talking and writing upon social and moral science, there is discoverable little or no trace of serious inquiry in regard to a subject which the more thoughtful Few, in all times, have agreed in placing at the very foundation of all public or private well-being. Nor, probably, will the astonishment diminish when, further, it is found that, amid all the vast mass of theologico-religious[Pg v] publications, periodical or other (supposing, indeed, any considerable proportion of them to survive to that age), no consciousness appeared to exist of the reality of such virtues as Humaneness and Universal Compassion, or of any obligation upon the writers to exhibit them to the serious consideration of the world: and this, notwithstanding the contemporary existence of a long-established association of humanitarian reformers who, though few in number, and not in the position of dignity and power which compels the attention of mankind, none the less by every means at their disposal—upon the platform and in the press, by pamphlets and treatises appealing at once to physical science, to reason, to conscience, to the authority of the most earnest thinkers, to the logic of facts—had been protesting against the cruel barbarisms, the criminal waste, and the demoralising influences of Butchery; and demonstrating by their own example, and by that of vast numbers of persons in the most different parts of the globe, the entire practicability of Humane Living.

When, further, it is revealed in the popular literature, as well as in the scientific books and journals of this nineteenth century, that the innocent victims of the luxurious gluttony of the richer classes in all communities, subjected as they were to every conceivable kind of brutal atrocity, were yet, by the science of the time, acknowledged, without controversy, to be beings essentially of the same physical and mental organisation with their human devourers; to be as susceptible to physical suffering and pain as they; to be endowed—at all events, a very large proportion of them—with reasoning and mental faculties in very high degrees, and far from destitute of moral perceptions, the amazement may well be conjectured to give way to incredulity, that such knowledge and such practices could possibly co-exist. That the outward signs of all this gross barbarism—the entire or mangled bodies of the victims of the Table—were accustomed to be put up for public exhibition in every street and thoroughfare, without manifestations of disgust or abhorrence from the passers-by—even from those pretending to most culture or fashion—such outward proofs of extraordinary insensibility on the part of all classes to finer feeling may, nevertheless, scarcely provoke so much astonishment from an enlightened posterity as the fact that every public gathering of the governors or civil dignitaries of the country; every celebration of ecclesiastical or religious festivals appeared to be made the special occasion of the sacrifice and suffering of a greater number and variety than usual of their harmless[Pg vi] fellow-beings; and all this often in the near neighbourhood of starving thousands, starving from want of the merest necessaries of life.

Happily, however, there will be visible to the philosopher of the Future signs of the dawn of the better day in this last quarter of the nineteenth century. He will find, in the midst of the general barbarism of life, and in spite of the prevailing indifferentism and infidelity to truth, that there was a gradually increasing number of dissenters and protesters; that already, at the beginning of that period, there were associations of dietary reformers—offshoots from the English parent society, founded in 1847—successively established in America, in Germany, in Switzerland, in France, and, finally, in Italy; small indeed in numbers, but strenuous in efforts to spread their principles and practice; that in some of the larger cities, both in this country and in other parts of Europe, there had also been set on foot Reformed Restaurants, which supplied to considerable numbers of persons at once better food and better knowledge.

If the truth or importance of any Principle or Feeling is to be measured, not by its popularity, indeed—not by the quod ab omnibus—but by the extent of its recognition by the most refined and the most earnest thinkers in all the most enlightened times—by the quod a sapientibus—the value of no principle has better been established than that which insists upon the vital importance of a radical reform in Diet. The number of the protesters against the barbarism of human living who, at various periods in the known history of our world, have more or less strongly denounced it, is a fact which cannot fail to arrest the attention of the most superficial inquirer. But a still more striking characteristic of this large body of protestation is the variety of the witnesses. Gautama Buddha and Pythagoras, Plato and Epikurus, Seneca and Ovid, Plutarch and Clement (of Alexandria), Porphyry and Chrysostom, Gassendi and Mandeville, Milton and Evelyn, Newton and Pope, Ray and Linné, Tryon and Hecquet, Cocchi and Cheyne, Thomson and Hartley, Chesterfield and Ritson, Voltaire and Swedenborg, Wesley and Rousseau, Franklin and Howard, Lambe and Pressavin, Shelley and Byron, Hufeland and Graham, Gleïzès and Phillips, Lamartine and Michelet, Daumer and Struve—such are some of the more or less famous, or meritorious, names in the Past to be found among the prophets of Reformed Dietetics, who, in various degrees of abhorrence, have shrunk from the régime of blood. Of many of those who have revolted from it, it may almost be said that they revolted in spite of themselves—in[Pg vii] spite, that is to say, of the most cherished prejudices, traditions, and sophisms of Education.

If we seek the historical origin of anti-kreophagist philosophy, it is to the Pythagorean School, in the later development of the Platonic philosophy especially, that the western world is indebted for the first systematic enunciation of the principle, and inculcation of the practice, of anti-materialistic living—the first historical protest against the practical materialism of every-day eating and drinking. How Christianity, which, in its first origin, owes so much to, and was so deeply imbued with, on the one hand, Essenian, and, on the other, Platonic principles, to the incalculable loss of all the succeeding ages, has failed to propagate and develope this true and vital spiritualism—in spite, too, of the convictions of some of its earliest and best exponents, an Origen or Clemens, seems to be explained, in the first instance, by the hostility of the triumphant and orthodox Church to the “Gnostic” element which, in its various shapes, long predominated in the Christian Faith, and which at one time seemed destined to be the ruling sentiment in the Church; and, secondly, by the natural growth of materialistic principles and practice in proportion to the growth of ecclesiastical wealth and power; for, although the virtues of “asceticism,” derived from Essenism and Platonism, obtained a high reputation in the orthodox Church, they were relegated and appropriated to the ecclesiastical order (theoretically at least), or rather to certain departments of it.

Such was what may be termed the sectarian cause of this fatal abandonment of the more spiritual elements of the new Faith, operating in conjunction with the corrupting influences of wealth and power. As regards the humanitarian reason of anti-materialistic living, the failure and seeming incapacity of Christianity to recognise this, the most significant of all the underlying principles of reformation in Diet—the cause is not far to seek. It lay, essentially, in the (theoretical) depreciation of, and contempt for, present as compared with future existence. All the fatal consequence of this theoretical teaching (which yet has had no extensive influence, even in the way it might have been supposed to act beneficially), in regard to the status and rights of the non-human species, has been well indicated by a distinguished authority. “It should seem,” writes Dr. Arnold,[Pg viii] “as if the primitive Christians, by laying so much stress upon a future life, and placing the lower beings out of the pale of hope [of extended existence], placed them at the same time out of the pale of sympathy, and thus laid the foundation for this utter disregard of [other] animals in the light of our fellow-beings. Their definition of Virtue was the same as that of Paley—that it was good performed for the sake of ensuring everlasting happiness; which, of course, excluded all the [so-called] brute creatures.”[1] Hence it comes about that Humanitarianism and, in particular, Humane Dietetics, finds no place whatever in the religionism or pseudo-philosophy of the whole of the ages distinguished as the Mediæval—that is to say, from about the fifth or sixth to the sixteenth century—and, in fact, there existed not only a negative indifferentism, but even a positive tendency towards the still further depreciation and debasement of the extra-human races, of which the great doctor of mediæval theology, St. Thomas Aquinas (in his famous Summa Totius Theologiæ—the standard text book of the orthodox church), is especially the exponent. After the revival of reason and learning in the sixteenth century, to Montaigne, who, following Plutarch and Porphyry, reasserted the rights of the non-human species in general; and to Gassendi, who reasserted the right of innocent beings to life, in particular, among philosophers, belongs the supreme merit of being the first to dispel the long-dominant prejudices, ignorance, and selfishness of the common-place teachers of Morals and Religion. For orthodox Protestantism, in spite of its high-sounding name, so far at least as its theology is concerned, has done little in protesting against the infringement of the moral rights of the most helpless and the most harmless of all the members of the great commonwealth of Living Beings.

The principles of Dietary Reform are widely and deeply founded upon the teaching of (1) Comparative Anatomy and Physiology; (2) Humaneness, in the two-fold meaning of Refinement of Living, and of what is commonly called “Humanity;” (3) National Economy; (4) Social Reform; (5) Domestic and Individual Economy; (6) Hygienic Philosophy, all of which are amply displayed in the following pages. Various minds are variously affected by the same arguments, and the force of each separate one will appear to be of different weight according to the special bias of the inquirer. The accumulated weight of all, for those who are able to form a calm and impartial judgment, cannot but cause the subject to appear one which demands and requires the most serious attention. To the present writer, the humanitarian argument appears to be of[Pg ix] double weight; for it is founded upon the irrefragable principles of Justice and Compassion—universal Justice and universal Compassion—the two principles most essential in any system of ethics worthy of the name. That this argument seems to have so limited an influence—even with persons otherwise humanely disposed, and of finer feeling in respect to their own, and, also, in a general way, to other species—can be attributed only to the deadening power of custom and habit, of traditional prejudice, and educational bias. If they could be brought to reflect upon the simple ethics of the question, divesting their minds of these distorting media, it must appear in a light very different from that in which they accustom themselves to consider it. This subject, however, has been abundantly insisted upon with eloquence and ability much greater than the present writer has any pretensions to. It is necessary to add here, upon this particular branch of the subject, only one or two observations. The popular objections to the disuse of the flesh-diet may be classified under the two heads of fallacies and subterfuges. Not a few candid inquirers, doubtless, there are who sincerely allege certain specious objections to the humanitarian argument, which have a considerable amount of apparent force; and these fallacies seem alone to deserve a serious examination.

In the general constitution of life on our globe, suffering and slaughter, it is objected, are the normal and constant condition of things—the strong relentlessly and cruelly preying upon the weak in endless succession—and, it is asked, why, then, should the human species form an exception to the general rule, and hopelessly fight against Nature? To this it is to be replied, first: that, although, too certainly, an unceasing and cruel internecine warfare has been waged upon this atomic globe of ours from the first origin of Life until now, yet, apparently, there has been going on a slow, but not uncertain, progress towards the ultimate elimination of the crueller phenomena of Life; that, if the carnivora form a very large proportion of Living Beings, yet the non-carnivora are in the majority; and, lastly, what is still more to the purpose, that Man, most evidently, by his origin and physical organisation, belongs not to the former but to the latter; besides and beyond which, that in proportion as he boasts himself—and as he is seen at his best (and only so far) he boasts himself with justness—to be the highest of all the gradually ascending and co-ordinated series of Living Beings, so is he, in that proportion, bound to prove his right to the supreme place and power, and his asserted claims to moral as well as mental superiority, by his conduct.[Pg x] In brief, in so far only as he proves himself to be the beneficent ruler and pacificator—and not the selfish Tyrant—of the world, can he have any just title to the moral pre-eminence.

If the philosophical fallacy (the eidolon specûs) thus vanishes under a near examination; the next considerable objection, upon a superficial view, not wholly unnatural, that, if slaughtering for food were to be abolished, there would be a failure of manufacturing material for the ordinary uses of social life, is, in reality, based upon a contracted apprehension of facts and phenomena. For it is a reasonable and sufficient reply, that the whole history of civilisation, as it has been a history of the slow but, upon the whole, continuous advance of the human race in the arts of Refinement, so, also, has it proved that demand creates supply—that it is the absence of the former alone which permits the various substances, no less than the various forces, yet latent in Nature to remain uninvestigated and unused. Nor can any thoughtful person, who knows anything of the history of Science and Discovery, doubt that the resources of Nature and the mechanical ingenuity of man are all but boundless. Already, notwithstanding the absence of any demand for them, excepting within the ranks of anti-kreophagists, various non-animal substances have been proposed, in some cases used, as substitutes for the prepared skins of the victims of the Slaughter-house; and that, in the event of a general demand for such substitutes, there would spring up an active competition among inventors and manufacturers in this direction there is not the least reason for doubt. Besides, it must be taken into account that the process of conversion of the flesh-eating (that is to say, of the richer) sections of communities to the bloodless diet will, only too certainly, be very slow and gradual.

As for the popular—perhaps the most popular—fallacy (the eidolon fori), which exhibits little of philosophical accuracy, or, indeed, of common reason, involved in the questions: “What is to become of the animals?” and, “Why were they created, if they are not intended for Slaughter and for human food?”—it is scarcely possible to return a grave reply. The brief answer, of course, is—that those variously-tortured beings have been brought into existence, and their numbers maintained, by selfish human invention only. Cease to breed for the butcher, and they will cease to exist beyond the numbers necessary for lawful and innocent use; they were “created” indeed, but they have been created by man, since he has vastly modified and, by no means, for the benefit of his helpless dependants, the natural form and organisation of the original types, the parent stocks of the domesticated Ox, Sheep,[Pg xi] and Swine, now very remote from the native grandeur and vigour of the Bison, the Mouflon, and the wild Boar.

There remains one fallacy of quite recent origin. An association has been formed—somewhat late in the day, it must be allowed—consisting of a few sanitary reformers, who put forward, also, humane reasons, for “Reform of the Slaughter-Houses,” one of the secondary propositions of which is, that the savagery and brutality of the Butchers’ trade could be obviated by the partial or general use of less lingering and revolting modes of killing than those of the universal knife and axe. No humanitarian will refuse to welcome any sign, however feeble, of the awakening of the conscience of the Community, or rather of the more thoughtful part of it, to the paramount obligations of common Humanity, and of the recognition of the claims of the subject species to some consideration and to some compassion, if not of the recognition of the claims of Justice; or will refuse to welcome any sort of proposition to lessen the enormous sum total of atrocities to which the lower animals are constantly subjected by human avarice, gluttony, and brutality. But, at the same time, no earnest humanitarian can accept the sophism, that an attempt at a mitigation of cruelty and suffering which, fundamentally, are unnecessary, ought to satisfy the educated conscience or reason. Vainly do the more feeling persons, who happen to have some scruples of conscience in respect to the sanction of the barbarous practice of Butchering, think to abolish the cruelties, while still indulging the appetite for the flesh luxuries, of the Table. The vastness of the demands upon the butchers—demands constantly increasing with the pecuniary resources of the nation, and stimulated by the pernicious example of the wealthy classes; the immensity of the traffic in “live stock” (as they complacently are termed) by rail and by ship,[2] the frightful horrors of which it has often been attempted, though inadequately, to describe; the utter impossibility of efficiently supervising and regulating such traffic and such slaughter—even supposing the desire to do so to exist to any considerable extent—and the inveterate[Pg xii] indifferentism of the Legislature and of the influential classes, sufficiently declare the futility of such expectation and of the indulgence of such comfortable hope. It is, in brief, as with other attempts at patching and mending, or at applying salves to a hopelessly festered and gangrened wound, merely to put the “flattering unction” of compromise to the conscience. “Diseases, desperate grown, by desperate appliances are relieved, or not at all;” the foul stream of cruelty must be stopped at its source; the fountain and origin of the evil—the Slaughter-House itself—must be abolished. Delendum est Macellum.

It has been well said by one of the most eloquent of the prophets of Humane Living, that there are steps on the way to the summit of Dietetic Reform, and, if only one step be taken, yet that that single step will be not without importance and without influence in the world. The step, which leaves for ever behind it the barbarism of slaughtering our fellow-beings, the Mammals and Birds, is, it is superfluous to add, the most important and most influential of all.

As for the plan of the present work, living writers and authorities—numerous and important as they are—necessarily have been excluded. Its bulk, already extended beyond the original conception of its limits, otherwise would have been swollen to a considerably larger size. For its entire execution, as well as for the collection and arrangement of the matter, the compiler alone is responsible; and, conscious that it must fall short of the completeness at which he aimed, he can pretend only to the merits of careful research and an eclectic impartiality. To the fact that the work already has appeared in the pages of the Dietetic Reformer, to which it has been contributed periodically during a space of time extending over five years, is owing some repetition of matter, which also, necessarily, is due to the nature of the subject. Errors of inadvertence, it is hoped, will be found to be few and inconsiderable. For the rest, he leaves the Ethics of Diet to the candour of the critics and of the public.

HESIOD—the poet par excellence of peace and of agriculture, as Homer is of war and of the “heroic” virtues—was born at Ascra, a village in Bœotia, a part of Hellas, which, in spite of its proverbial fame for beef-eating and stupidity, gave birth to three other eminent persons—Pindar, the lyric poet, Epameinondas, the great military genius and statesman, and Plutarch, the most amiable moralist of antiquity.

The little that is known of the life of Hesiod is derived from his Works and Days. From this celebrated poem we learn that his father was an emigrant from Æolia, the Greek portion of the north-west corner of the Lesser Asia; that his elder brother, Perses, had, by collusion with the judges, deprived him of his just inheritance; that after this he settled at Orchomenos, a neighbouring town—in the pre-historical ages a powerful and renowned city. This is all that is certainly known of the author of the Works and Days, and The Theogony. Of the genuineness of the former there has been little or no doubt; that of the latter—at least in part—has been called in question. Besides these two chief works, there is extant a piece entitled The Shield of Herakles, in imitation of the Homeric Shield (Iliad xviii.) The Catalogues of Women—a poem commemorating the heroines beloved by the gods, and who were thus the ancestresses of the long line of heroes, the reputed founders of the ruling families in Hellas—is lost.

The charm of the Works and Days—the first didactic poem extant—is its apparent earnestness of purpose and simplicity of style. The author’s frequent references to, and rebuke of, legal injustices—his sense of which had been quickened by the iniquitous decisions of the judges already referred to—are as naïve as they are pathetic.

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Of the Theogony, the subject, as the title implies, is the history of the generation and successive dynasties of the Olympian divinities—the objects of Greek worship. It may, indeed, be styled the Hellenic Bible, and, with the Homeric Epics, it formed the principal theology of the old Greeks, and of the later Romans or Latins. The “Proœmium,” or introductory verses—in which the Muses are represented as appearing to their votary at the foot of the sacred Helicon, and consecrating him to the work of revealing the divine mysteries by the gift of a laurel-branch—and the following verses, describing their return to the celestial mansions, where they hymn the omnipotent Father, are very charming. To the long description of the tremendous struggle of the warring gods and Titans, fighting for the possession of heaven, Milton was indebted for his famous delineation of a similar conflict.

The Works and Days, in striking contrast with the military spirit of the Homeric epic, deals in plain and simple verse with questions ethical, political, and economic. The ethical portion exhibits much true feeling, and a conviction of the evils brought upon the earth by the triumph of injustice and of violence. The well-known passages in which the poet figures the gradual declension and degeneracy of men from the golden to the present iron race, are the remote original of all the later pleasing poetic fictions of golden ages and times of innocence.

According to Hesiod, there are two everlastingly antagonistic agents at work on the Earth; the spirit of war and fighting, and the peaceful spirit of agriculture and mechanical industry. And in the apostrophe in which he bitterly reproaches his unrighteous judges—

he seems to have a profound conviction of the truth taught by Vegetarianism—that luxurious living is the fruitful parent of selfishness in its manifold forms.[3]

That Hesiod regarded that diet which depends mainly or entirely upon agriculture and upon fruits as the highest and best mode of life is sufficiently evident in the following verses descriptive of the “Golden Age” life:—

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The second race—the “Silver Age”—inferior to the first and wholly innocent people, were, nevertheless, guiltless of bloodshed in the preparation of their food; nor did they offer sacrifices—in the poet’s judgment, it appears, a damnable error. For the third—the “Brazen Age”—it was reserved to inaugurate the feast of blood:—

According to Hesiod, who is followed by the later poets, the “immortals inhabiting the Olympian mansions” feast ever on the pure and bloodless food of Ambrosia, and their drink is Nectar, which may be taken to be a sort of refined dew. He represents the divine Muses of Helicon, who inspire his song, as reproaching the shepherds, his neighbours, “that tend the flocks,” with the possession of “mere fleshly appetites.”

Ovid, amongst the Latins, is the most charming painter of the innocence of the “Golden Age.” Amongst our own poets, Pope, Thomson, and Shelley—the last as a prophet of the future and actual rather than the poet of a past and fictitious age of innocence—have contributed to embellish the fable of the Past and the hope of the Future.

“A GREATER good never came, nor ever will come, to mankind, than that which was imparted by the gods through Pythagoras.” Such is the expression of enthusiastic admiration of one of his biographers. To those who are unacquainted with the historical development of Greek thought and Greek philosophy it may seem to be merely the utterance of the partiality of hero-worship. Those, on the other hand, who know anything of that most important history, and of the influence, direct or indirect, of Pythagoras upon the most intellectual and earnest minds of his countrymen—in particular upon Plato and his followers, and through them upon the later Jewish and upon very early Christian ideas—will acknowledge, at least, that the name of the prophet of Samos is that of one of the most important and influential factors in the production and progress of higher human thought.

There is a true and there is a false hero-worship. The latter, whatever it may have done to preserve the blind and unreasoning subservience of mankind, has not tended to accelerate the progress of the world towards the attainment of truth. The old-world occupants of the popular Pantheon—“the patrons of mankind, gods and sons of gods, destroyers rightlier called and plagues of men”—are indeed fast losing, if they have not entirely lost, their ancient credit, but their vacant places have yet to be filled by the representatives of the most exalted ideals of humanity. Whenever, in the place of the representatives of mere physical and mental force, the true heroes shall be enthroned, amongst the moral luminaries and pioneers who have contributed to lessen the thick darkness of ignorance, barbarism, and selfishness, the name of the first western apostle of humanitarianism and of spiritualism must assume a prominent position.

It is a natural and legitimate curiosity which leads us to wish to know, with something of certainty and fulness, the outer and inner life of the master spirits of our race. Unfortunately, the personality of many of the most interesting and illustrious of them is of a vague and shadowy kind. But when we reflect that little more is known of the personal life of Shakspere than of that of Pythagoras or Plato—not to mention other eminent names—our surprise is lessened that, in an age long preceding the discovery of printing, the records of a life even so important and influential as that of the founder of Pythagoreanism are meagre and scanty.

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The earliest account of his teaching is given by Philolaus (“Lover of the People,” an auspicious name) of Tarentum, who, born about forty or fifty years after the death of his master—was thus contemporary with Sokrates and Plato. His Pythagorean System, in three books, was so highly esteemed by Plato that he is said to have given £400 or £500 for a copy, and to have incorporated the principal part of it in his Timæus. Sharing the fate of so many other valuable products of the Greek genius, it has long since perished. Our remaining authorities for the Life are Diogenes of Laerte, Porphyry, one of the most erudite writers of any age, and Iamblichus. Of these, the biography of the last is the fullest, if not the most critical; that of Porphyry wants the beginning and the end; whilst of the ten books of Iamblichus On the Pythagorean Sect (Περὶ Πυθαγόρου Αἱρέσεως), of which only five remain, the first was devoted to the life of the founder. Diogenes, who seems to have been of the school of Epikurus, belongs to the second, while Porphyry and Iamblichus, the well-known exponents of Neo-Platonism, wrote in the third and fourth centuries of our era.

Pythagoras was born in the Island of Samos, somewhere about the year 570 B.C. At some period in his youth, Polykrates—celebrated by the fine story of Herodotus—had acquired the tyranny of Samos, and his rule, like that of most of his compeers, has deserved the stigma of the modern meaning of the Greek equivalent for princely and monarchical government. The future philosopher, we are told, unable to descend to the ordinary arts of sycophancy and dissimulation, left his country, and entered, like the Sirian philosopher of Voltaire, upon an extensive course of travels—extensive for the age in which he lived. How far he actually travelled is uncertain. He visited Egypt, the great nurse of the old-world science, and Syria, and it is not impossible that he may have penetrated eastwards as far as Babylon, perhaps as the captive of the recent conqueror of Egypt—the Persian Kambyses. It was in the East, and particularly in Egypt, that he probably imbibed the dogma of the immortality of the soul, or, as he chose to represent it to the public, that of the metempsychosis—a fancy widely spread in the eastern theologies.

It has been asserted that he had already abandoned the orthodox diet at the age of nineteen or twenty. If this was actually the fact, he has the additional merit of having adopted the higher life by his own original force of mind and refinement of feeling. If not, he may have derived the most characteristic as well as the most important of his teachings from the Egyptians or Persians, or, through them, even from the Hindus—the most religiously strict abstainers from the flesh of animals. It is remarkable that the two great apostles of abstinence—Pythagoras[Pg 6] and Sakya-Muni, or Buddha—were almost contemporaries; nor is it impossible that the Greek may, in whatever way, have become acquainted with the sublime tenets of the Hindu prophet, who had lately seceded from Brahminism, the established sacerdotal and exclusive religion of the Peninsula, and promulgated his great revelation—until then new to the world—that religion, at least his religion, was to be “a religion of mercy to all beings,” human and non-human.[7]

As the natural and necessary result of his pure living, we are told by Iamblichus that “his sleep was brief, his soul vigilant and pure, and his body confirmed in a state of perfect and invariable health.” He appears to have passed the period of middle life when he returned to Samos, where his reputation had preceded him. Either, however, finding his countrymen hopelessly debased by the corrupting influence of despotism, or believing that he would find a better field for the propagandism of his new revelation, he not long afterwards set out for Southern Italy, then known as “Great Greece,” by reason of its numerous Greek colonies, or, rather, autonomous communities. At Krotona his fame and eloquence soon attracted, it seems, a select if not numerous auditory; and there he founded his famous society—the first historical anti-flesh-eating association in the western world—the prototype, in some respects, of the ascetic establishments of Greek and Catholic Christendom. It consisted of about three hundred young men belonging to the most influential families of the city and neighbourhood.

It was the practice of the Egyptian priestly caste and of other exclusive institutions to reserve their better ideas (of a more satisfactory sort, at all events, than the system of theology that was promulgated to the mass of the community), into which only privileged persons were initiated. This esoteric method, which under the name of the mysteries has exercised the learned ingenuity of modern writers—who have, for the most part, vainly laboured to penetrate the obscurity enveloping the most remarkable institution of the Hellenic theology—was accompanied with the strictest vows and circumstances of silence and secrecy. As for the priestly order, it was their evident policy to maintain the superstitious ignorance of the people and to overawe their minds, while in regard to the philosophic sects, it was perhaps to shield themselves from the priestly or popular suspicion that they shrouded their scepticism in this dark and convenient disguise. The parabolic or esoteric method was, perhaps, almost a necessity of the earlier ages. It is to be lamented that it should be still in favour in this safer age, and that the old exclusiveness[Pg 7] of the mysteries is in esteem with many modern authorities, who seem to hold that to unveil the spotless Truth to the multitude is “to cast pearls before swine.”

It was probably from the philosophic motive that the founder of the new society instituted his grades of catechumens and probationary course, as well as vows of the strictest secrecy. The exact nature of all his interior instruction is necessarily very much matter of conjecture, inasmuch as, whether he committed his system to writing or not, nothing from his own hand has come down to us. However this may be, it is evident that the general spirit and characteristic of his teaching was self-denial or self-control, founded upon the great principles of justice and temperance; and that communism and asceticism were the principal aim of his sociology. He was the founder of communism in the West—his communistic ideas, however, being of an aristocratic and exclusive rather than of a democratic and cosmopolitan kind. “He first taught,” says Diogenes, “that the property of friends was to be held in common—that friendship is equality—and his disciples laid down their money and goods at his feet, and had all things common.”

The moral precepts of the great master were much in advance of the conventional morality of the day. He enjoined upon his disciples, the same biographer informs us, each time they entered their houses to interrogate themselves—“How have I transgressed? What have I done? What have I left undone that I ought to have done?” He exhorted them to live in perfect harmony, to do good to their enemies and by kindness to convert them into friends. “He forbade them either to pray for themselves, seeing that they were ignorant of what was best for them; or to offer slain victims (σφαγια) as sacrifices; and taught them to respect a bloodless altar only.” Cakes and fruits, and other innocent offerings were the only sacrifices he would allow. This, and the sublime commandment “Not to kill or injure any innocent animal,” are the grand distinguishing doctrines of his moral religion. So far did he carry his respect for the beautiful and beneficent in Nature, that he specially prohibited wanton injury to cultivated and useful trees and plants.

By confining themselves to the innocent, pure, and spiritual dietary he promised his followers the enjoyment of health and equanimity, undisturbed and invigorating sleep, as well as a superiority of mental and moral perceptions. As for his own diet, “he was satisfied,” says Porphyry, “with honey or the honeycomb, or with bread only, and he did not taste wine from morning to night (μεθ’ἣμεραν); or his principal dish was often kitchen herbs, cooked or uncooked. Fish he ate rarely.”

Humanitarianism—the extension of the sublime principles of justice and of compassion to all innocent sentient life, irrespective of nationality,[Pg 8] creed, or species—is a very modern and even now very inadequately recognised creed; and, although there have been here and there a few, like Plutarch and Seneca, who were “splendidly false,” to the spirit of their age, the recognition of the obligation (the practice has always been a very different thing) of benevolence and beneficence, so far from being extended to the non-human races, until a comparatively recent time has been limited to the narrow bounds of country and citizenship; and patriotism and internationalism are, apparently, two very opposite principles.

The obligation to abstain from the flesh of animals was founded by Pythagoras on mental and spiritual rather than on humanitarian grounds. Yet that the latter were not ignored by the prophet of akreophagy is evident equally by his prohibition of the infliction of pain, no less than of death, upon the lower animals, and by his injunction to abstain from the bloody sacrifices of the altar. Such was his abhorrence of the Slaughter-House, Porphyry tells us, that not only did he carefully abstain from the flesh of its victims, but that he could never bring himself to endure contact with, or even the sight of, butchers and cooks.

While thus careful of the lives and feelings of the innocent non-human races, he recognised the necessity of making war upon the ferocious carnivora. Yet to such a degree had he become familiar with the habits and dispositions of the lower animals that he is said, by the exclusive use of vegetable food, not only to have tamed a formidable bear, which by its devastations on their crops had become the terror of the country people, but even to have accustomed it to eat that food only for the remainder of its life. The story may be true or fictitious, but it is not incredible; for there are well-authenticated instances, even in our own times, of true carnivora that have been fed, for longer or shorter periods, upon the non-flesh diet.[8]

“Amongst other reasons, Pythagoras,” says Iamblichus, “enjoined abstinence from the flesh of animals because it is conducive to peace. For those who are accustomed to abominate the slaughter of other animals, as iniquitous and unnatural, will think it still more unjust and unlawful to kill a man or to engage in war.” Specially, he[Pg 9] “exhorted those politicians who are legislators to abstain. For if they were willing to act justly in the highest degree, it was indubitably incumbent upon them not to injure any of the lower animals. Since how could they persuade others to act justly, if they themselves were proved to be indulging an insatiable avidity by devouring these animals that are allied to us. For through the communion of life and the same elements, and the sympathy thus existing, they are, as it were, conjoined to us by a fraternal alliance.”[9] Maxims how different from those in favour in the present “year of grace,” 1877! If the refined thinker of the sixth century B.C. were now living, what would be his indignation at the enormous slaughter of innocent life for the public banquets at which our statesmen and others are constantly fêted, and which are recorded in our journals with so much magniloquence and minuteness? His hopes for the regeneration of his fellow-men would surely be terribly shattered. We may apply the words of the great Latin satirist, Juvenal, who so frequently denounces in burning language the luxurious gluttony of his countrymen under the Empire—“What would not Pythagoras denounce, or whither would he not flee, could he see these monstrous sights—he who abstained from the flesh of all other animals as though they were human?” (Satire xv.)

How long the communistic society of Krotona remained undisturbed is uncertain. Inasmuch as its reputation and influence were widely spread, it may be supposed that the outbreak of the populace (the origin of which is obscure), by which the society was broken up and his disciples massacred, did not happen until many years after its establishment. At all events, it is commonly believed that Pythagoras lived to an advanced age, variously computed at eighty, ninety, or one hundred years.

It is not within our purpose to discuss minutely the scientific or theological theories of Pythagoras. In accordance with the abstruse speculative character of the Ionic school of science, which inclined to refer the origin of the universe to some one primordial principle, he was led by his mathematical predilections to discover the cosmic element in numbers, or proportion—a theory which savours of John Dalton’s philosophy, now accepted in chemistry, and a virtual enunciation of what we now call quantitative science. Pythagoras taught the Kopernican theory prematurely. He regarded the sun as more divine than the earth, and therefore set it in the centre of the earth and planets. The argument was surely a mark of genius, but it was too transcendental for his contemporaries, even for Plato and Aristotle. His elder contemporary, the celebrated Thales of Miletus, with whom in his early youth he may have been acquainted, may claim, indeed, to be the remote originator of the famous nebular hypothesis of Laplace and modern astronomy. Another cardinal doctrine of the Pythagorean school was the musical, from whence the idea, so popular with the poets, of the “music of the spheres.” To[Pg 10] music was attributed the greatest influence in the control of the passions. In its larger sense, by the Greeks generally, the term “Music” (Musice—pertaining to the Muses) denoted, it is to be remembered, not alone the “concord of sweet sounds,” but also an artistic and æsthetic education in general—all humanising and refining instruction.

The famous doctrine of the Metempsychosis or Transmigration of Souls also was, doubtless, a prominent feature in the Pythagorean system; but it is probable that we may presume that by it Pythagoras intended merely to convey to the “uninstructed,” by parable, the sublime idea that the soul is gradually purified by a severe course of discipline until finally it becomes fitted for a fleshless life of immortality.[10] We are chiefly concerned with his attitude in regard to flesh eating. There can be no question that abstinence was a fundamental part of his system, yet certain modern critics—little in sympathy with so practical a manifestation of the higher life, or, indeed, with self-denial of any kind—have sometimes affected either to doubt the fact or to pass it by in contemptuous silence, thus ignoring what for the after ages stands out as by far the most important residuum of Pythagoreanism. In support of this scepticism the fact of the celebrated athlete Milo, whose prodigies of strength have become proverbial, has been quoted. Yet if these critics had been at the pains of inquiring somewhat further, they would have learned, on the contrary, that the non-flesh diet is exactly that which is most conducive to physical vigour; that in the East there are at this day non-flesh eaters, who in feats of strength might put even our strongest men to the blush. The extraordinary powers of the porters and boatmen of Constantinople have been remarked by many travellers; and the Chinese coolies and others are almost equally notorious for their marvellous powers of endurance. Yet their food is not only of the simplest—rice, dhourra (i.e., millet), onions, &c.—but of the scantiest possible. Moreover, the elder Greek athletes themselves, for the most part, trained on vegetarian diet. Not to multiply details, the fact that, upon a moderate calculation, two-thirds at least of the population of our globe—including the mass of the inhabitants of these islands—live, nolentes, volentes, on a dietary from which flesh is almost altogether necessarily excluded, is on the face of it sufficient proof in itself of the non-necessity of the diet of the rich.

While the general consent of antiquity and of later times has received as undoubted the obligation of strict abstinence on the part of the immediate followers of Pythagoras, it seems that as regards the un[Pg 11]initiated, or (to use the ecclesiastical term) catechumens, the obligation was not so strict. Indeed relaxation of the rules of the higher life was simply a sine quâ non of securing the attention of the mass of the community at all; and, like one still more eminent than himself in an after age, he found it a matter of necessity to present a teaching and a mode of living not too exalted and unattainable by the grossness and “hardness of heart” of the multitude. Hence, in all probability, the seeming contradictions in his teaching on this point found in the narratives of his followers.

If his critics had been more intent on discovering the excellence of his rules of abstinence than on discussing, with frivolous diligence, the probable or possible reasons of his alleged prohibition of beans, it would have redounded more to their credit for wisdom and love of truth. Assuming the fact of the prohibition, in place of collecting all the most absurd gossip of antiquity, they might perhaps have found a more rational and more solid reason in the hypothesis that the bean being, as used in the ballot, a symbol and outward and visible sign of political life, was employed by Pythagoras parabolically to dissuade his followers from participating in the idle strife of party faction, and to exhort them to concentrate their efforts upon an attempt to achieve the solid and lasting reformation of mankind.[11] But to be much concerned in a patient inquiry after truth unhappily has been not always the characteristic of professional commentators.

Blind hero-worship or idolatry of genius or intellect, even when directed to high moral aims, is no part of our creed; and it is sufficient to be assured that he was human, to be free to confess that the historical founder of akreophagy was not exempt from human infirmity, and that he could not wholly rise above the wonder-loving spirit of an uncritical age. Deducting all that has been imputed to him of the fanciful or fantastic, enough still remains to force us to recognise in the philosopher-prophet of Samos one of the master-spirits of the world.[12]

THE most renowned of all the prose writers of antiquity may be said to have been almost the lineal descendant, in philosophy, of the teacher of Samos. He belonged to the aristocratic families of Athens—“the eye of Greece”—then and for long afterwards the centre of art and science. His original name was Aristokles, which he might well have retained. Like another equally famous leader in literature, François Marie Arouet, he abandoned his birth-name, and he assumed or acquired the name by which he is immortalised, to characterise, as it is said, either the breadth of his brow or the extensiveness of his mental powers. In very early youth he seems to have displayed his literary aptitude and tastes in the various kinds of poetry—epic, tragic, and lyric—as well as to have distinguished himself as an athlete in the great national contests or “games,” as they were called, the grand object of ambition of every Greek. He was instructed in the chief and necessary parts of a liberal Greek education by the most able professors of the time. He devoted himself with ardour to the pursuit of knowledge, and sedulously studied the systems of philosophy which then divided the literary world.

In his twentieth year he attached himself to Sokrates, who was then at the height of his reputation as a moralist and dialectician. After the judicial murder of his master, 399, he withdrew from his native city, which, with a theological intolerance extremely rare in pagan antiquity, had already been disgraced by the previous persecution of another eminent teacher—Anaxagoras—the instructor of Euripides and of Perikles. Plato then resided for some time at Megara, at a very short distance from Athens, and afterwards set out, according to the custom of the eager searchers after knowledge of that age, on a course of travels.

He traversed the countries which had been visited by Pythagoras, but his alleged visit to the further East is as traditional as that of his predecessor. The most interesting fact or tradition in his first travels is his alleged intimacy with the Greek prince of Syracuse, the elder Dionysius, and his invitation to the western capital of the Hellenic world. The story that he was given up by his perfidious host to the Spartan envoy, and by him sold into slavery, though not disprovable, may be merely an exaggerated account of the ill-treatment which he actually received.

His grand purpose in going to Italy was, without doubt, the desire to become personally known to the eminent Pythagoreans whose head[Pg 13]quarters were in the southern part of the Peninsula, and to secure the best opportunities of making himself thoroughly acquainted with their philosophic tenets. At that time the most eminent representative of the school was the celebrated Archytas, one of the most extraordinary mathematical geniuses and mechanicians of any age. Upon his return to Athens, at about the age of forty, he established his ever-memorable school in the suburban groves or “gardens” known as Ἀκαδημία—whence the well-known Academy by which the Platonic philosophy is distinguished, and which, in modern days, has been so much vulgarised. All the most eminent Athenians, present and future, attended his lectures, and among them was Aristotle, who was destined to rival the fame of his master. From about 388 to 347, the date of his death, he continued to lecture in the Academy and to compose his Dialogues.

In the intervals of his literary and didactic labours he twice visited Sicily; the first time at the invitation of his friend Dion, the relative and minister of the two Dionysii, the younger of whom had succeeded to his father’s throne, and whom Dion hoped to win to justice and moderation by the eloquent wisdom of the Athenian sage. Such hopes were doomed to bitter disappointment. His second visit to Syracuse was undertaken at the urgent entreaties of his Pythagorean friends, of whose tenets and dietetic principles he always remained an ardent admirer. For whatever reason, it proved unsuccessful. Dion was driven into exile, and Plato himself escaped only by the interposition of Archytas. Thus the only chance of attempting the realisation of his ideal of a communistic commonwealth—if he ever actually entertained the hope of realising it—was frustrated. Almost the only source of the biographies of Plato are the Letters ascribed to him, commonly held to be fictitious, but maintained to be genuine by Grote. The narrative of the first visit to Sicily is found in the seventh Letter.

We can refer but briefly to the nature of the philosophy and writings of Plato. In the notice of Pythagoras it has been stated that Plato valued very highly that teacher’s methods and principles. Pythagoreanism, in fact, enters very largely into the principal writings of the great disciple and exponent (and, it may safely be added, improver) of Sokrates, especially in the Republic and the Timæus. The four cardinal virtues inculcated in the Republic—justice or righteousness (Δικαιοσύνη), temperance or self-control (Εγκρατεία or Σωφροσύνη), prudence or wisdom (Φρονήσις), fortitude (Ἀνδρεία)—are eminently pythagorean.

The characteristic of the purely speculative portion of Platonism is the theory of ideas (used by the author in the new sense of unities, the original meaning being forms and figures), of which it may be said that its merit depends upon its poetic fancy rather than upon its scientific value.[Pg 14] Divesting it of the verbiage of the commentators, who have not succeeded in making it more intelligible, all that need be said of this abstruse and fantastic notion is, that by it he intended to convey that all sensible objects which, according to him, are but the shadows and phantoms of things unseen, are ultimately referable to certain abstract conceptions or ideas, which he termed unities, that can only be reached by pure thinking. Hence he asserted that “not being in a condition to grasp the idea of the Good with full distinctness, we are able to approximate to it only so far as we elevate the power of thinking to its proper purity.” Whatever may be thought of the premiss, the truth and utility of the deduction may be allowed to be as unquestionable as they are unheeded. This characteristic theory may be traced to the belief of Plato not only in the immortality, but also in the past eternity of the soul. In the Phædrus, under the form of allegory, he describes the soul in its former state of existence as traversing the circuit of the universe where, if reason duly control the appetite, it is initiated, as it were, into the essences of things which are there disclosed to its gaze. And it is this ante-natal experience, which supplies the fleshly mind or soul with its ideas of the beautiful and the true.

The subtlety of the Greek intellect and language was, apparently, an irresistible temptation to their greatest ornaments to indulge in the nicest and most mystic speculation, which, to the possessors of less subtle intellects and of a far less flexible language, seems often strangely unpractical and hyperbolic. Thus while it is impossible not to be lost in admiration of the marvellous powers of the Greek dialectics, one cannot but at the same time regret that faculties so extraordinary should have been expended (we will not say altogether wasted) in so many instances on unsubstantial phantoms. If, however, the transcendentalism of the Platonic and other schools of Greek thought is matter for regret, how must we not deplore the enormous waste of time and labour apparent in the theological controversies of the first three or four centuries of Christendom—at least of Greek Christendom—when the omission or insertion of a single letter could profoundly agitate the whole ecclesiastical world and originate volumes upon volumes of refined, indeed, but useless verbiage. Yet even the ecclesiastical Greek writers of the early centuries may lay claim to a certain originality and merit of style which cannot be conceded to the “schoolmen” of the mediæval ages, and of still later times, whose solemn trifling—under the proud titles of Platonists and Aristotelians, or Nominalists and Realists, and the numerous other appellations assumed by them—for centuries was received with patience and even applause. Nor, unfortunately, is this war of Phantoms by any means unknown or extinct in our day. It was the lament of Seneca,[Pg 15] often echoed by the most earnest minds, that all, or at least the greater part of, our learning is expended upon words rather than upon the acquisition of wisdom.[13]

Plato deserves his high place among the Immortals not so much on account of any very definite results from his philosophy as on account of its general tendency to elevate and direct human thought and aspirations to sublime speculations and aims. Of all his Dialogues, the most valuable and interesting, without doubt, is the Republic—the one of his writings upon which he seems to have bestowed the most pains, and in which he has recorded the outcome of his most mature reflections. Next may be ranked the Phædo and the Phædrus—the former, it is well known, being a disquisition on the immortality of the soul. In spite of certain fantastic conceptions, it must always retain its interest, as well by reason of its speculations on a subject which is (or rather which ought to be) the most interesting that can engage the mind, as because it purports to be the last discourse of Sokrates, who was expecting in his prison the approaching sentence of death. The Phædrus derives its unusual merit from the beauty of the language and style, and from the fact of its being one of the few writings of antiquity in which the charms of rural nature are described with enthusiasm.

The Republic, with which we are here chiefly concerned, since it is in that important work that the author reproduces the dietetic principles of Pythagoras, may have been first published amongst his earlier writings, about the year 395; but that it was published in a larger and revised edition at a later period is sufficiently evident. It consists of ten Books. The question of Dietetics is touched upon in the second and third, in which Plato takes care to point out the essential importance to the well-being of his ideal state, that both the mass of the community and, in a special degree, the guardians or rulers, should be educated and trained in proper dietetic principles, which, if not so definitely insisted upon as we could wish them to have been, sufficiently reveal the bias of his mind towards Vegetarianism. In the second Book the discussion turns principally upon the nature of Justice; and there is one passage which, still more significant for the age in which it was written, is not without instruction for the present. While Sokrates is discussing the subject with his interlocutors, one of them is represented as objecting:

[Pg 16]

Very useful and necessary for those times, and not wholly inapplicable to less remote ages, is the incidental remark in the same book, that “there are quacks and soothsayers who flock to the rich man’s doors, and try to persuade him that they have a power at command which they procure from heaven, and which enables them, by sacrifices and incantations, performed amid feasting and indulgence, to make amends for any crime committed either by the individual himself or by his ancestors.... And in support of all these assertions they produce the evidence of poets—some, to exhibit the facilities of vice, quoting the words:—

It is the fifth Book, however, which has always excited the greatest interest and controversy, for therein he introduces his Communistic views. Our interest in it is increased by the fact that it is the original of the ideal Communisms of modern writers—the prototype of the Utopia of More, of the New Atlantis of Francis Bacon, the Oceanica of Harrington, and the Gaudentio of Berkeley, &c.

In maintaining the perfect natural equality of women to men,[15] and insisting upon an identity of education and training, he advances propositions which perhaps only the more advanced of the assertors of women’s rights might be prepared to entertain. Whatever may have been said by the various admirers of Plato, who have been anxious to present his political or social views in a light which might render them less in conflict with modern Conservatism, there can be no doubt for any candid reader of the Republic that the author published to the world his bonâ fide convictions. One of the dramatis personæ of the dialogue, while expressing his concurrence in the Communistic legislation of Sokrates, at the same time objects to the difficulty of realising it in actual life, and desires Sokrates to point out whether, and how, it could be really practicable. Whereupon Sokrates (who it is scarcely[Pg 17] necessary to remark, is the convenient mouthpiece of Plato) replies: “Do you think any the worse of an artist who has painted the beau idéal of human beauty, and has left nothing wanting in the picture, because he cannot prove that such a one as he has painted might possibly exist? Were not we, likewise, proposing to construct, in theory, the pattern of a perfect State? Will our theory suffer at all in your good opinion if we cannot prove that it is possible for a city to be organised in the manner proposed?”

As has been well paraphrased by the interpreters to whom we are indebted for the English version: “The possibilities of realising such a commonwealth in actual practice is quite a secondary consideration, which does not in the least affect the soundness of the method or the truth of the results. All that can fairly be demanded of him is to show how the imperfect politics at present existing may be brought most nearly into harmony with the perfect State which has just been described. To bring about this great result one fundamental change is necessary, and only one: the highest political power must, by some means or other, be vested in philosophers.” The next point to be determined is, What is, or ought to be, implied by the term philosopher, and what are the characteristics of the true philosophic disposition? “They are—(1) an eager desire for the knowledge of all real existence; (2) hatred of falsehood, and devoted love of truth; (3) contempt for the pleasures of the body; (4) indifference to money; (5) high-mindedness and liberality; (6) justice and gentleness; (7) a quick apprehension and a good memory; (8) a musical, regular, and harmonious disposition.” But how is this disposition to be secured? Under the present condition of things, and the corrupting influences of various kinds, where temptations abound to compromise truth and substitute expediency and self-interest, it would seem wellnigh impossible and Utopian to expect it.

“How is this evil to be remedied? The State itself must regulate the study of philosophy, and must take care that the students pursue it on right principles, and at a right age. And now, surely, we may expect to be believed when we assert that if a State is to prosper it must be governed by philosophers. If such a contingency should ever take place (and why should it not?), our ideal State will undoubtedly be realised. So that, upon the whole, we come to this conclusion: The constitution just described is the best, if it can be realised; and to realise it is difficult, but not impossible.” At this moment, when the question of compulsory education, under the immediate superintendence of the State, is being fought with so much fierceness—on one side, at least—to recur to Plato might not be without advantage.

In the most famous dialogue of Plato—the Republic, or, as it might[Pg 18] be termed On Justice—the principal interlocutors, besides Sokrates, are Glaukon, Polymachus, and Adeimantus; and the whole piece originates in the chance question which rose between them, “What is Justice?” In the second Book, from which the following passage is taken, the discussion turns upon the origin of society, which gives opportunity to Sokrates to develop his opinions upon the diet best adapted for the community—at all events, for the great majority:—

Justly holding that the best laws will be of little avail unless the administrators of them shall be just and virtuous, Sokrates, in the Third Book, proceeds to lay down rules for the education and diet of the magistrates or executive, whom he calls—in conformity with the Communistic system—guardians:—

Elsewhere, in a well-known passage (in The Laws), Plato pronounces that the springs of human conduct and moral worth depend principally on diet. “I observe,” says he, “that men’s thoughts and actions are intimately connected with the threefold need and desire (accordingly as they are properly used or abused, virtue or its opposite is the result) of eating, drinking, and sexual love.” He himself was remarkable for the extreme frugality of his living. Like most of his countrymen, he was a great eater of figs; and so much did he affect that frugal repast that he was called, par excellence, the “lover of figs” (φιλόσυκος).

The Greeks, in general, were noted among the Europeans for their abstemiousness; and Antiphanes, the comic poet (in Athenæus), terms them “leaf-eaters” (φυλλοτρῶγες). Amongst the Greeks, the Athenians and Spartans were specially noted for frugal living. That of the latter is proverbial. The comic poets frequently refer, in terms of ridicule, to what seemed to them so unaccountable an indifferentism to the “good things” of life on the part of the witty and refined people of Attica. See the Deipnosophists (dinner-philosophers) of Athenæus (the great repertory of the bon-vivantism of the time), and Plutarch’s Symposiacs.

[Pg 21]

It has been pointed out by Professor Mahaffy, in his recent work on old Greek life, that slaughter-houses and butchers are seldom, or never, mentioned in Greek literature. “The eating of [flesh] meat,” he observes, “must have been almost confined to sacrificial feasts; for, in ordinary language, butchers’ meat was called victim (ἱερεῖον). The most esteemed, or popular, dishes were madsa, a sort of porridge of wheat or barley; various kinds of bread (see Deipn. iii.); honey, beans, lupines, lettuce and salad, onions and leeks. Olives, dates, and figs formed the usual fruit portion of their meals. In regard to non-vegetable food, fish was the most sought after and preferred to anything else; and the well-known term opson, which so frequently recurs in Greek literature, was specially appropriated to it.

Contemporary with the great master of language was the great master of medicine, Hippokrates, (460–357) who is to his science what Homer is to poetry and Herodotus to history—the first historical founder of the art of healing. He was a native of Kōs, a small island of the S.W. coast of Lesser Asia, the traditional cradle and home of the disciples of Asklepios, or Æsculapius (as he was termed by the Latins), the semi-divine author and patron of medicine. And it may be remarked, in passing, that the College of Asklepiads of Kōs were careful to exercise a despotism as severe and exclusive as that which obtains, for the most part, with the modern orthodox schools.

Amongst a large number of writings of various kinds attributed to Hippokrates is the treatise On Regimen in Acute Diseases (περὶ Διαίτης Ὀξέων), which is generally received as genuine; and On the Healthful Regimen (περὶ Διαίτης Ὑγιεινῆς), which belongs to the same age, though not to the canonical writings of the founder of the school himself. He was the author, real or reputed, of some of the most valuable apophthegms of Greek antiquity. Ars longa—Vita brevis (education is slow; life is short) is the best known, and most often quoted. What is still more to our purpose is his maxim—“Over-drinking is almost as bad as over-eating.” Of all the productions of this most voluminous of writers, his Aphorisms (Ἀφορισμοί), in which these specimens of laconic wisdom are collected, and which consists of some four hundred short practical sentences, are the most popular.

About a century after the death of Plato appeared a popular exposition of the Pythagorean teaching, in hexameters, which is known by the title given to it by Iamblichus—the Golden Verses. “More than half of them,” says Professor Clifford, “consist of a sort of versified ‘Duty to God and my Neighbour,’ except that it is not designed by the rich to be obeyed by the poor; that it lays stress on the laws of health; and that it is just such sensible counsel for the good and right conduct of life as an Englishman might now-a-days give to his son.”

Hierokles, an eminent Neo-Platonist of the fifth century, A.D., gave a course of lectures upon them at Alexandria—which since the time of the Ptolemies had been one of the chief centres of Greek learning and science—and his commentary is sufficiently interesting. Suïdas, the lexicographer, speaks of his matter and style in the highest terms of praise. “He astonished his hearers everywhere,” he tells us, “by the calm, the magnificence, the width of his superlative intellect, and by the sweetness of his speech, full of the most beautiful words and things.” The Alexandrian lecturer quotes the old Pythagorean maxims:

[Pg 22]

The following extracts will serve as a specimen of the religious or moral character of the Golden Verses:—

Referring to these verses, which inculcate that the human race is itself responsible for the evils which men, for the most part, prefer to regret than to remedy, Professor Clifford, to whom we are indebted for the above version of the Golden Verses, remarks on the merits of this teaching, that it reminds us that “men suffer from preventible evils, that the people perish for lack of knowledge.”[20] Thus we find that the[Pg 23] principal obstructions, in all ages, to human progress and perfectibility may be ever found in IGNORANCE and SELFISHNESS.

THE school of Pythagoras and of Plato, although it was not the fashionable or popular religion of Rome, counted amongst its disciples some distinguished Italians, and the name of Cicero, who belonged to the “New Academy,” is sufficiently illustrious. The Italians, however, who borrowed their religion as well as their literature from the Greeks, were never distinguished, like their masters, for that refinement of thought which might have led them to attach themselves to the Pythagorean teaching. Under the bloody despotism of the Empire, the philosophy which was most affected by the literati and those who were driven to the consolations of philosophy was the stoical, which taught its disciples to consider apathy as the summum bonum of existence. This school of philosophy, whatever its other merits, was too much centred in self—paradoxical as the assertion may seem—to have much regard for the rest of mankind, much less for the non-human species. Nor, while they professed supreme contempt for the luxuries and even comforts of life, did the disciples of the “Porch,” in general, practice abstinence from any exalted motive, humanitarian or spiritual. They preached indifference for the “good things” of this life, not so much to elevate the spiritual and moral side of human nature as to show their contempt for human life altogether.

That the Italian was essentially of a more barbarous nature than the Greek is apparent in the national spectacles and amusements. The savage scenes of gladiatorial and non-human combat and internecine slaughter of the Latin amphitheatres, of which the famous Colosseum in the capital was the model of many others in the provinces, were abhorrent to the more refined Greek mind.[21] In view of scenes so sanguinary—the “Roman holiday”—it is scarcely necessary to observe that humanitarianism was a creed unknown to the Italians; and it was not likely that a people, addicted throughout their career as a dominant race to the most bloody wars, not only foreign but also internecine, with whom fighting and slaughter of their own kind was an almost daily occupation, should entertain any feeling of pity (to say nothing of justice)[Pg 24] towards their non-human dependants. Nevertheless, even they were not wholly inaccessible, on occasion, to the prompting of pity. Referring to a grand spectacle given by Pompeius at the dedication of his theatre (B.C. 55), in which a large number of elephants, amongst others, were forced to fight, the elder Pliny tells us:—

Cicero, who was himself present at the spectacle of the Circus, in a letter to a friend, Marcus Marius, writes:—

Testimonies which might induce one almost to think that, had not they been systematically and industriously accustomed to these horrible and gigantic butcheries by their rulers, even the Roman populace might have been susceptible of better feelings and desires than those inspired by their amphitheatres, though these savage exhibitions were perhaps hardly worse than the combats and slaughter in the bull-rings of Seville or Madrid, or at the courts of the Mohammedan princes of India recently sanctioned by the presence of English royalty. It is worth noting, in passing, that while the gladiatorial slaughters were discontinued some years after the triumph of Christianity, the other part of the entertainment—the indiscriminate combats and slaughter of the non-human victims—continued to be exhibited to a much later period.

If we reflect that the rise of the humanitarian spirit in Christian Europe, or rather in the better section of it, is of very recent origin, it might appear unreasonable to look for any distinct exhibition of so exalted a feeling in the younger age of the world. Yet, to the shame of more advanced civilisations, we find manifestations of it in the writings of a few of the more refined minds of Greece and Italy; and Plutarch[Pg 25] and Seneca—the former particularly—occupy a distinguished place amongst the first preachers of that sacred truth.[23]

Publius Ovidius Naso, the Latin versifier of the Pythagorean philosophy, was born B.C. 43. He belonged to the equestrian order, a position in the social scale which corresponds with the “higher middle class” of modern days. Like so many other names eminent in literature, he was in the first instance educated for the law, for which, also like many other literary celebrities, he soon showed his genius to be unfitted and uncongenial. He studied at the great University of that age—Athens—where he acquired a knowledge of the Greek language, and probably of its rich literature. The most memorable event in his life—which, in accordance with the fashion of his contemporaries of the same rank, was for the most part devoted to “gallantry” and the accustomed amatory licence—is his mysterious banishment from Rome to the inhospitable and savage shores of the Euxine, where he passed the last seven years of his existence, dying there in the sixtieth year of his age. The cause of his sudden exile from the Court of Augustus, where he had been in high favour, is one of those secrets of history which have exercised the ingenuity of his successive biographers. According to the terms of the imperial edict, the freedom of the poet’s Ars Amatoria was the offence. That this was a mere pretext is plain, as well from the long interval of time which had passed since the publication of the poem as from the character of the fashionable society of the capital. Ovid himself attributes his misfortune to the fact of his having become the involuntary witness of some secret of the palace, the nature of which is not divulged.

His most important poems are (1) The Metamorphoses, in fifteen books, so called from its being a collection of the numerous transformations of the popular theology. It is, perhaps, the most charming of Latin poems that have come down to us. Particular passages have a special beauty. (2) The Fasti, in twelve books, of which only six are extant, is the Roman Calendar in verse. Its interest, apart from the poetic genius of the author, is great, as being the grand repertory of the Latin feasts and their popular origin. Besides these two principal poems he was the author of the famous Loves, in three books; the Letters of the Heroines, The Remedies of Love, and The Tristia, or Sad Thoughts. He also wrote a tragedy—Medea—which, unfortunately has not come down to us. All his poems are characterised by elegance and a remark[Pg 26]able smoothness and regularity of versification, and in much of his productions there is an unusual beauty and picturesqueness of poetic ideas.

The following passage from the fifteenth book of the Metamorphoses has been justly said by Dryden, his translator, to be the finest part of the whole poem. It is almost impossible to believe but that, in spite of his misspent life, he must have felt, in his better moments at least, something of the truth and beauty of the Pythagorean principles which he so exquisitely versifies. In the touching words which he puts into the mouth of the jealous Medea—the murderess of her children—he might have exclaimed in his own case—

LUCIUS ANNÆUS SENECA, the greatest name in the stoic school of philosophy, and the first of Latin moralists, was born at Corduba (Cordova) almost contemporaneously with the beginning of the Christian era. His family, like that of Ovid, was of the equestrian order. He was of a weakly constitution; and bodily feebleness, as with many other great intellects, served to intensify if not originate, the activity of the mind. At Rome, with which he early made acquaintance, he soon gained great distinction at the bar; and the eloquence and fervour he displayed in the Senate before the Emperor Caligula excited the jealous hatred of that insane tyrant. Later in life he obtained a prætorship, and he was also appointed to the tutorship of the young Domitius, afterwards the Emperor Nero. On the accession of that prince, at the age of seventeen, to the imperial throne, Seneca became one of his chief advisers.

[Pg 28]

Unfortunately for his credit as a philosopher, while exerting his influence to restrain the vicious propensities of his old pupil, he seems to have been too anxious to acquire, not only a fair proportion of wealth, but even an enormous fortune, and his villas and gardens were of so splendid a kind as to provoke the jealousy and covetousness of Nero. This, added to his alleged disparagement of the prince’s talents, especially in singing and driving, for which Nero particularly desired to be famous, was the cause of his subsequent disgrace and death. The philosopher prudently attempted to anticipate the will of Nero by a voluntary surrender of all his accumulated possessions, and he sought to disarm the jealous suspicions of the tyrant by a retired and unostentatious life. These precautions were of no avail; his death was already decided. He was accused of complicity in the conspiracy of Piso, and the only grace allowed him was to be his own executioner. The despair of his wife, Pompeia Paulina, he attempted to mitigate by the reflection that his life had been always directed by the standard of a higher morality. Nothing, however, could dissuade her from sharing her husband’s fate, and the two faithful friends laid open their veins by the same blow.

Advanced age and his extremely meagre diet had left little blood in Seneca’s veins, and it flowed with painful slowness. His tortures were excessive and, to avoid the intolerable grief of being witnesses of each other’s suffering, they shut themselves up in separate apartments. With that marvellous intrepid tranquillity which characterised some of the old sages, Seneca calmly dictated his last thoughts to his surrounding friends. These were afterwards published. His agonies being still prolonged, he took hemlock; and this also failing, he was carried into a vapour-stove, where he was suffocated, and thus at length ceased to suffer.

In estimating the character of Seneca, it is just that we should consider all the circumstances of the exceptional time in which his life was cast. Perhaps there has never been an age or people more utterly corrupt and abandoned than that of the period of the earlier Roman Cæsars and that of Rome and the large cities of the empire. Allowing the utmost that his detractors have brought against him, the moral character of the author of the Consolations and Letters stands out in bright relief as compared with that of the immense majority of his contemporaries of equal rank and position, who were sunk in the depths of licentiousness and of selfish indifference to the miseries of the surrounding world. That his public career was not of so exalted a character altogether as are his moral precepts, is only too patent to be denied and, in this shortcoming of a loftier ideal, he must share reproach with some of the most esteemed of the world’s luminaries. If, for instance, we compare him with Cicero or with Francis Bacon, the comparison would certainly[Pg 29] be not unfavourable to Seneca. The darkest stigma on the reputation of the great Latin moralist is his connivance at the death of the infamous Agrippina, the mother of his pupil Nero. Although not to be excused, we may fairly attribute this act to conscientious, if mistaken, motives. His best apology is to be found in the fact that, so long as he assisted to direct the counsels of Nero, he contrived to restrain that prince’s depraved disposition from those outbreaks which, after the death of the philosopher, have stigmatised the name of Nero with undying infamy.

The principal writings of Seneca are:—

1. On Anger. His earliest, and perhaps his best known, work.

2. On Consolation. Addressed to his mother, Helvia. An admirable philosophical exhortation.

3. On Providence; or, Why evils happen to good men though a divine Providence may exist.

4. On Tranquillity of Mind.

5. On Clemency. Addressed to Nero Cæsar. One of the most meritorious writings of all antiquity. It is not unworthy of being classed with the humanitarian protests of Beccaria and Voltaire. The stoical distinction between clemency and pity (misericordia), in book ii., is, as Seneca admits, merely a dispute about words.

6. On the Shortness of Life. In which the proper employment of time and the acquisition of wisdom are eloquently enforced as the best employment of a fleeting life.

7. On a Happy Life. In which he inculcates that there is no happiness without virtue. An excellent treatise.

8. On Kindnesses.

9. Epistles to Lucilius. 124 in number. They abound in lessons and precepts in morality and philosophy, and, excepting the De Irâ, have been the most read, perhaps, of all Seneca’s productions.

10. Questions on Natural History. In seven books.

Besides these moral and philosophic works, he composed several tragedies. They were not intended for the stage, but rather as moral lessons. As in all his works, there is much of earnest thought and feeling, although expressed in rhetorical and declamatory language.

What especially characterises Seneca’s writings is their remarkably humanitarian spirit. Altogether he is imbued with this, for the most part, very modern feeling in a greater degree than any other writer, Greek or Latin. Plutarch indeed, in his noble Essay on Flesh Eating, is more expressly denunciatory of the barbarism of the Slaughter House, and of the horrible cruelties inseparably connected with it, and evidently felt more deeply the importance of exposing its evils. The Latin moralist, however, deals with a wider range of ethical questions,[Pg 30] and on such subjects, as, e.g., the relations of master and slave, is far ahead of his contemporaries. His treatment of Dietetics, in common with that of most of the old-world moralists, is rather from the spiritual and ascetic than from the purely humanitarian point of view. “The judgments on Seneca’s writings,” says the author of the article on Seneca in Dr. Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Latin Biography, “have been as various as the opinions about his character, and both in extremes. It has been said of him that he looks best in quotations; but this is an admission that there is something worth quoting, which cannot be said of all writers. That Seneca possessed great mental powers cannot be doubted. He had seen much of human life, and he knew well what man is. His philosophy, so far as he adopted a system, was the stoical; but it was rather an eclecticism of stoicism than pure stoicism. His style is antithetical, and apparently laboured; and where there is much labour there is generally affectation. Yet his language is clear and forcible—it is not mere words—there is thought always. It would not be easy to name any modern writer, who has treated on morality and has said so much that is practically good and true, or has treated the matter in so attractive a way.”

Jerome, in his Ecclesiastical Writers, hesitates to include him in the catalogue of his saints only because he is not certain of the genuineness of the alleged literary correspondence between Seneca and St. Paul. We may observe, in passing, on the remarkable coincidence of the presence of the two greatest teachers of the old and the new faiths in the capital of the Roman Empire at the same time; and it is possible, or rather highly probable, that St. Paul was acquainted with the writings of Seneca; while, from the total silence of the pagan philosopher, it seems that he knew nothing of the Pauline epistles or teaching. Amongst many testimonies to the superiority of Seneca, Tacitus, the great historian of the empire, speaks of the “splendour and celebrity of his philosophic writings,” as well as of his “amiable genius”—ingenium amœnum. (Annals, xii., xiii.) The elder Pliny writes of him as “at the very head of all the learned men of that time.” (xiv. 4.) Petrarch quotes the testimony of Plutarch, “that great man who, Greek though he was freely confesses ‘that there is no Greek writer who could be brought into comparison with him in the department of morals.’”

The following passage is to be found in a letter to Lucilius, in which, after expatiating on the sublimity of the teaching of the philosopher Attalus in inculcating moderation and self-control in corporeal pleasures, Seneca thus enunciates his dietetic opinions:—

Seneca here cautiously reveals the jealous suspicion with which the first Cæsars viewed all foreign, and especially quasi-religious, innovations, and his own public compliance, to some extent, with the orthodox dietetic practices. Yet that in private life he continued to practise, as well as to preach, a radical dietary reformation is sufficiently evident to all who are conversant with his various writings. The refinement and gentleness of his ethics are everywhere apparent, and exhibit him as a man of extraordinary sensibility and feeling.

As for dietetics, he makes it a matter of the first importance, on which he is never weary of insisting.[Pg 32] “We must so live, not as if we ought to live for, but as though we could not do without, the body.” He quotes Epikurus: “If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to conventionalism, you will never be rich. Nature demands little; fashion (opinio) superfluity.” In one of his letters he eloquently describes the riotous feasting of the period which corresponds to our festival of Christmas—another illustration of the proverb, “History repeats itself”:—

He contrasts with all this waste and gluttony the simplicity and frugality of Epikurus, who, in a letter to his friend Polyænus, declares that his own food does not cost him sixpence a day; while his friend Metrodorus, who had not advanced so far in frugality, expended the whole of that small sum:—

Again, Seneca writes:—

[Pg 33]

The extreme difficulty of abstinence is oftentimes alleged:—

On the occasion of a shipwreck, when his fellow-passengers found themselves forced to live upon the scantiest fare, he takes the opportunity to point out how extravagantly superfluous must be the ordinary living of the richer part of the community:—

Again:—

Again:—

[Pg 34]

We must be content with giving our readers only one more of Seneca’s exhortations to a reform in diet:—

If Seneca makes dietetics of the first importance, he at the same time by no means neglects the other departments of ethics, which, for the most part, ultimately depend upon that fundamental reformation; and he is equally excellent on them all. Space will not allow us to present our readers with all the admirable dicta of this great moralist. We cannot resist, however, the temptation to quote some of his unique teaching on certain branches of humanitarianism and philosophy little regarded either in his own time or in later ages. Slaves, both in pagan and Christian Europe, were regarded very much as the domesticated non-human species are at the present day, as born merely for the will and pleasure of their masters. Such seems to have been the universal estimate of their status. While often superior to their lords, nationally and individually, by birth, by mind, and by education, they were at the arbitrary disposal of too often cruel and capricious owners:—

[Pg 35]

He expressly denounces their cruel and contemptuous treatment, and demands in noble language (afterwards used by Epictetus, himself a slave):—

He denounces the haughty and insulting attitude of masters towards their helpless dependants, and lays down the precept: “So live with your dependant as you would wish your superior to live with you.” He laments the use of the term “slaves,” or “servants” (servi), in place of the old “domestics” (familiares). He declaims against the common prejudice which judges by the outward appearance:—

He is equally clear upon the ferocity and barbarity of the gladiatorial and other shows of the Circus, which were looked upon by his contemporaries as not only interesting spectacles, but as a useful school for war and endurance—much for the same reason as that on which the “sports” of the present day are defended. Cicero uses this argument, and only expresses the general sentiment. Not so Seneca. He speaks of a chance visit to the Circus (the gigantic Colosseum was not yet built), for the sake of mental relaxation, expecting to see, at the period of the day he had chosen, only innocent exercises. He indignantly narrates the horrid and bloody scenes of suffering, and demands, with only too much reason, whether it is not evident that such evil examples receive their righteous retribution in the deterioration of character of those who encourage them:—

[Pg 36]

In his treatise On Clemency, dedicated to his youthful pupil Nero, he anticipates the very modern theory—theory, for the prevalent practice is a very different thing—that prevention is better than punishment, and he denounces the cruel and selfish policy of princes and magistrates, who are, for the most part, concerned only to punish the criminals produced by unjust and unequal laws:—

Speaking of giving assistance to the needy, he says that the genuine philanthropist will give his money—

Next to the De Clementiâ and the De Irâ (“On Anger”), his treatise On the Happy Life is most admirable. In the abundance of what is unusually good and useful it is difficult to choose. His warning (so unheeded) against implicit confidence in authority and tradition cannot be too often repeated:—

Again:—

He repudiates the doctrines of Egoism for those of Altruism:—

Very admirable are his rebukes of unjust and insensate anger in regard to the non-human species:—

Again, of anger, as between human beings:—

Of the use of self-examination, he quotes the example of his excellent preceptor, Sextius, who strictly followed the Pythagorean precept to examine oneself each night before sleep:—

He adduces the feebleness and shortness of human life as one of the most forcible arguments against the indulgence of malevolence:—

[Pg 38]

Again, in dealing with the weak and defenceless:—

As to the conduct of life:—

Again:—

Excellent is his advice on the choice of books and of reading:—

[Pg 39]

In his 88th Letter Seneca well exposes the folly of a learning which begins and ends in mere words, which has no real bearing on the conduct of life and the instruction of the moral faculties:—

Elsewhere he indignantly demands:—

Anticipating the ultimate triumph of Truth, he well says:—

[Pg 40]

In his Questions on Nature, in which he often shows himself to have been much in advance of his contemporaries, and, indeed, of the whole mediæval ages, in scientific acumen, he takes occasion to reprobate the common practice of glorifying the lives and deeds of worthless princes and others, and exclaims in the modern spirit:—

It will be sufficiently apparent, from what we have presented to our readers, that Seneca, though nominally of the Stoic school, belonged in reality to no special sect or party. Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri. Bound to the words of no one master, he sought for truth everywhere. The authority whom he most frequently quotes with approval is Epicurus, the arch-enemy of Stoicism. Wiser and more candid than the great mass of sectaries, he scorns the tactics of partisanship. He justly recognises the fact that the “luxurious egoists have not derived their impulse or sanction from Epicurus; but, abandoned to their vices, they disguise their selfishness in the name of his philosophy.” He professes his own conviction to be “against the common prejudice of the popular writers of my own school, that the teaching of Epicurus was just and holy, and, on a close examination, essentially grave and sober.... I affirm this, that he is ill-understood, defamed, and depreciated.” (De Vitâ Beatâ, xii, xiii.)

It will also be sufficiently clear that the ethics of Seneca consist of no mere trials of skill in logomachy; in finely-drawn distinctions between words and names, as do so large a proportion both of modern and ancient dialectics. If so daring a heresy may possibly be forgiven us, we would venture to suggest that the authorities of our schools and universities might, with no inconsiderable advantage, substitute judicious excerpts from the Morals of Seneca for the Ethics of Aristotle; or, as Latin literature is now in question, even for the De Officiis of Cicero. This, however, is perhaps to indulge Utopian speculation too greatly. The mediæval spirit of scholasticism is not yet sufficiently out of favour at the ancient schools of Aquinas and Scotus.

THE years of the birth and death of the first of biographers and the most amiable of moralists are unknown. We learn from himself that he was studying philosophy at Athens under Ammonius, the Peripatetic, at the time when Nero was making his ridiculous progress through Greece. This was in 66 A.D., and the date of his birth may therefore be approximately placed somewhere about the year 40. He was thus a younger contemporary of Seneca. Chæronea, in Bœotia, claims the honour of giving him birth.

He lived several years at Rome and in other parts of Italy, where, according to the fashion of the age and the custom of the philosophic rhetoricians (of whom, probably, he was one of the very few whose prælections were of any real value), he gave public lectures, attended by the most eminent literary as well as social personages of the time, among whom were Tacitus, the younger Pliny, Quintilian, and perhaps Juvenal. These lectures may have formed the basis, if not the entire matter, of the miscellaneous essays which he afterwards published. When in Italy he neglected altogether the Latin language and literature, and the reason he gives proves the estimation in which he was held: “I had so many public commissions, and so many people came to me to receive instruction in philosophy.... it was, therefore, not till a late period in life that I began to read the Latin writers.” In fact, the very general indifference, or at least silence, of the Greek masters in regard to Latin literature is not a little remarkable.

It is asserted, on doubtful authority (Suidas), that he was preceptor of Trajan, in the beginning of whose reign he held the high post of Procurator of Greece; and he also filled the honourable office of Archon, or Chief Magistrate of his native city, as well as of priest of the Delphic Apollo. He passed the later and larger portion of his life in quiet retirement at Chæronea. The reason he assigns for clinging to that dull and decaying provincial town, although residence there was not a little inconvenient for him, is creditable to his citizen-feeling, since he believed that by quitting it he, as a person of influence, might contribute to its ruin. In all the relations of social life Plutarch appears to have been exemplary, and he was evidently held in high esteem by his fellow-citizens. As husband and father he was particularly admirable. The death of a young daughter, one of a numerous progeny, was the occasion of one of[Pg 42] his most affecting productions—the Consolation—addressed to his wife Timoxena. He himself died at an advanced age, in the reign of Hadrian.

Plutarch’s writings are sufficiently numerous. The Parallel Lives, forty-six in number, in which he brings together a Greek and a Roman celebrity by way of comparison, is perhaps the book of Greek and Latin literature which has been the most widely read in all languages. “The reason of its popularity,” justly observes a writer in Dr. Smith’s Dictionary, “is that Plutarch has rightly conceived the business of a biographer—his biography is true portraiture. Other biography is often a dull, tedious enumeration of facts in the order of time, with perhaps a summing up of character at the end. The reflections of Plutarch are neither impertinent nor trifling; his sound good sense is always there; his honest purpose is transparent; his love of humanity warms the whole. His work is and will remain, in spite of all the fault that can be found with it by plodding collectors of facts and small critics, the book of those who can nobly think and dare and do.”

His miscellaneous writings—indiscriminately classed under the title Moralia, or Morals, but including historical, antiquarian, literary, political, and religious disquisitions—are about eighty in number. As might be expected of so miscellaneous a collection, these essays are of various merit, and some of them are, doubtless, the product of other minds than Plutarch’s. Next to the Essay on Flesh Eating[38] may be distinguished as amongst the most important or interesting, That the Lower Animals Reason,[39] On the Sagacity of the Lower Animals—highly meritorious treatises, far beyond the ethical or intellectual standard of the mass of “educated” people even of our day—Rules for the Preservation of Health, A Discourse on the Training of Children, Marriage Precepts, or Advice to the Newly Married, On Justice, On the Soul, Symposiacs—in which he deals with a variety of interesting or curious questions—Isis and Osiris, a theological disquisition; On the Opinions of the Philosophers, On the Face that Appears in the Moon,[40] Political Precepts, Platonic Questions, and last, not least, his Consolation, addressed to Timoxena. Plutarch also wrote his autobiography. If it had come down to us it would have been one of the most interesting remains[Pg 43] of Antiquity, dealing, as we may well imagine it did deal, with some of the most important phenomena of the age. Possibly we might have had the expression of his feeling and attitude in regard to the new religion (established some 200 years later), which, strangely enough, is altogether overlooked or ignored as well by himself as by the other eminent writers of Greece and Italy.[41]

Plutarch was an especial admirer of Plato and his school, but he attached himself exclusively to no sect or system. He was essentially eclectic: he chose what his reason and conscience informed him to be the most good and useful from the various philosophies. As to the influence of his literary labours in instructing the world, it has been truly remarked by the author of the article in the Penny Cyclopædia that, “a kind, humane disposition, and a love of everything that is ennobling and excellent, pervades his writings, and gives the reader the same kind of pleasure that he has in the company of an esteemed friend, whose singleness of heart appears in everything that he says or does.” His personal character is, in fact, exactly reflected in his publications. That he was somewhat superstitious and of a conservative bias is sufficiently apparent;[42] but it is also equally clear, in his case, that the moral perceptions were not obscured by a selfishness which is too often the product of optimism, or self-complacent contentment with things as they are. In metaphysics, with all earnest minds oppressed by the terrible fact of the dominance of evil and error in the world, he vainly attempted to find a solution of the enigma in that prevalent Western Asiatic prejudice of a dualism of contending powers. He found consolation in the persuasion that the two antagonistic principles are not of equal power, and that the Good must eventually prevail over the Evil.

The Lives has gone through numerous editions in all languages. Of the Morals, the first translation in this country was made by Philemon Holland, M.D., London, 1603 and 1657. The next English version was published in 1684–1694, “by several hands.” The fifth edition, “revised and corrected from the many errors of the former edition,” appeared in 1718. The latest English version is that of Professor Goodwin, of Harvard University (1870), with an introduction by R. W. Emerson. It is, for the most part, a reprint of the revision of 1718, and consists of five octavo volumes. It is a matter equally for[Pg 44] surprise and regret that, in an age of so much literary, or at least publishing, enterprise, a judicious selection from the productions of so estimable a mind has never yet been attempted in a form accessible to ordinary readers.[43]

In his Symposiacs, discussing (Quest. ii.), “whether the sea or land affords the better food,” and summing up the arguments, he proceeds:—

We may infer that Plutarch advanced gradually to the perfect knowledge of the truth, and it is probable that his essay on Flesh-eating was published at a comparatively late period in his life, since in some of his miscellaneous writings, in alluding to the subject, he speaks in less decided and emphatic terms of its barbarism and inhumanity: e.g., in his Rules for the Preservation of Health, while recommending moderation in eating, and professing abstinence from flesh, he does not so expressly denounce the prevalent practice. Yet he is sufficiently pronounced even here in favour of the reformed diet on the score of health:—

That the non-Christian humanitarian of the first century was far ahead—we will not say of his contemporaries, but of the common crowd of writers and speakers of the present age in his estimate of the just rights and position of the innocent non-human races—will be sufficiently apparent from the following extract from his remarkable essay entitled, That the Lower Animals Reason, to which Montaigne seems to have been indebted. The essay is in the form of a dialogue between Odysseus (Ulysses) and Gryllus, who is one of the transformed captives of the sorceress Circe (see Odyssey ix.) Gryllus maintains the superiority[Pg 45] of the non-human races generally in very many qualities and in regard to many of their habits—e.g., in eating and drinking:—

Reprobating the harshness and inhumanity of Cato the Censor, who is usually regarded as the type of old Roman virtue, Plutarch, with his accustomed good feeling, declares:—

[Pg 46]

If we shall compare these sentiments of the pagan humanitarian with the every-day practices of modern christian society in the matter, e.g., of “knackers’ yards,” and other similar methods of getting rid of dumb dependants after a life-time of continuous hard labour—perhaps of bad usage, and even semi-starvation—the comparison scarcely will be in favour of christian ethics. From the essay On Flesh-Eating we extract the principal and most significant passages:—

[Pg 50]

Among the illustrious earlier contemporaries of Plutarch who practised no less than preached rigid abstinence, Apollonius of Tyana, the Pythagorean, one of the most extraordinary men of any age, deserves particular notice. He came into the world in the same year with the founder of Christianity, B.C. 4. The facts and fictions of his life we owe to Philostratus, who wrote his memoirs at the express desire of the Empress Julia Domna, the wife of Severus.

Apollonius, according to his biographer, came of noble ancestry. He early applied himself to severe study at the ever memorable Tarsus, where he may have known the great persecutor, and afterwards second founder, of Christianity. Disgusted with the luxury of the people, he soon exiled himself to a more congenial atmosphere, and applied himself to the examination of the various schools of philosophy—the Epicurean, the Stoic, the Peripatetic, &c.—finally giving the preference to the Pythagorean. He embraced the strictest ascetic life, and travelled extensively, visiting, in the first instance, Nineveh, Babylon, and, it is said, India, and afterwards Greece, Italy, Spain, and Roman Africa and Ethiopia. At the accession of Domitian, he narrowly escaped from the hands of that tyrant, after having voluntarily given himself up to his tribunal, by an exertion of his reputed supernatural power. He passed the last years of his life at Ephesus, where, according to the well-known story, he is said to have announced the death of Domitian at the very moment of the event at Rome. His alleged miracles were so celebrated, and so curiously resemble the Christian miracles, that they have excited an unusual amount of attention.[52]

[Pg 51]

Unfortunately, the life by Philostratus, in accordance with the taste of a necessarily uncritical age, is so full of the preternatural and marvellous that the real fact that the pythagorean philosopher had acquired and possessed extraordinary mental as well as moral faculties, which might well be deemed supernatural at that period, is too apt to be discredited. The Life was composed long after the death of the hero, and thus a considerable amount of inventive license was possible to the biographer; but that it rested upon an undoubted substratum of actual occurrences will scarcely be disputed. There is one passage which deserves to be transcribed as of wider application. The people of a town in Pamphylia (in the Lesser Asia), where the great Thaumaturgist chanced to be staying, were starving in the midst of plenty by the selfish policy of the monopolists of grain, and, driven to desperation, were on the point of attacking the responsible authorities. Apollonius, at this crisis, wrote the following address, and gave it to the magistrates to read aloud:—

Philostratus assures us that “intimidated by these indignant words they filled the market with grain, and the city recovered from its distress.”

THE earliest of the Latin Fathers extant is, also, one of the most esteemed by the Church,[54] notwithstanding the well-known heterodoxy of his later life, as the first Apologist of Christianity in the Western and Latin world. He was a native of Carthage, the son of an officer holding an important post under the imperial government. The facts of his life known to us are very few, nor is it ascertained at what period he became a convert to the new religion, or when he was ordained as presbyter. The ill-treatment to which he was subjected by his clerical brethren at Rome induced him, it seems, to throw in his lot with the Montanist sect, in whose defence he wrote several books. He lived to an advanced age.

[Pg 52]

Of his numerous works the best known (by name at least) is his Apologeticus (“An Apology for Christianity”). Amongst his other treatises we may enumerate De Spectaculis (“On Shows”), On Idolatry, On the Soldier’s Crown (in which Tertullian raises the question of the lawfulness of the “violent and sanguinary occupation” of the soldier, but rather, however, for the reason of the circumstances of the pagan ceremonial), On Monogamy, On the Dress of Women (upon the extravagance of which the “Old Fathers” were eloquently denunciative), Address to his Wife. The treatise which here concerns us is his De Jejuniis Adversus Psychicos.[55]

Tertullian sets himself to expose the subterfuge of a large proportion of the professing Christians in his day who appealed to the pretended authority of Christ and his Apostles for the lawfulness of flesh-eating. Especially does he refute the (supposed) defence of kreophagy in I. Tim. iv., 3.[56] As to the celebrated verse in Genesis which solemnly enjoins the vegetable diet, the opponents of abstinence allege the permission afterwards given to the “post-diluvians.”

[Pg 53]

He quotes the various passages in the Jewish Scriptures, in which the causes of the idolatrous proclivities and the crimes of the earlier Jews are connected by Jehovah and his prophets with flesh-eating and gross living:—

He instances Daniel and his countrymen, “who preferred vegetable food and water to the royal dishes and goblets, and so became more comely than the rest, in order that no one might fear for his personal appearance; while, at the same time, they were still more improved in understanding.” As to the priesthood:—

[Pg 54]

In regard to St. Paul’s well-known sentences (Rom. xiv., 1, &c.), Tertullian maintains that he refers to certain teachers of abstinence who acted from pride, not from a sense of right:—

THE attitude of the first great Christian writers and apologists in regard to total abstinence was somewhat peculiar. Trained in the school of Plato, in the later development of neo-platonism, their strongest convictions and their personal sympathies were, naturally, anti-kreophagistic. The traditions, too, of the earliest period in the history of Christianity coincided with their pre-Christian convictions, since the immediate and accredited representatives of the Founder of the new religion, who presided over the first Christian society, were commonly held to have been, equally with their predecessors and contemporaries the Essenes, strict abstinents from flesh-eating.[63]

Moreover, the very numerous party in the Church—the most diametrically opposed in other respects to the Jewish or Ebionite Christians—the Gnostics or philosophical Christians, “the most polite, the most learned, and the most wealthy of the Christian name,” for the most part agreed with their rivals for orthodox supremacy in aversion from flesh, and, as it seems, for nearly the same reason—a belief in the essential and inherent evil of matter, a persuasion, it may be said, however unscientific, not unnatural, perhaps, in any age, and certainly not surprising in an age especially characterised by the grossest materialism,[Pg 57] selfishness, and cruelty. But the creed of the Christian church, which eventually became the prevailing and ruling dogma, like that of the English Church at the Revolution of the sixteenth century, was a compromise—a compromise between the two opposite parties of those who received and those who rejected the old Jewish revelation.

On the one hand Christianity, in its later and more developed form, had insensibly cast off the rigid formalism and exclusiveness of Mosaism, and, on the other, had stamped with the brand of heresy the Greek infusion of philosophy and liberalism. Unfortunately, unable clearly to distinguish between the true and the false—between the accidental and fanciful and the permanent and real—timidly cautious of approving anything which seemed connected with heresy—the leaders of the dominant body were prone to seek refuge in a middle course, in regard to the question of flesh-eating, scarcely consistent with strict logic or strict reason. While advocating abstinence as the highest spiritual exercise or aspiration, they seem to have been unduly anxious to disclaim any motives other than ascetic—to disclaim, in fine, humanitarian or “secular” reason, such as that of the Pythagoreans.

Such was the feeling, apparently, of the later orthodox church, at least in the West. While, however, we thus find, occasionally, a certain constraint and even contradiction in the theory of the first great teachers of the Church, the practice was much more consistent. That, in fact, during the first three or four centuries the most esteemed of the Christian heroes and saints were not only non-flesh-eaters but Vegetarians of the extremest kind (far surpassing, if we give any credit to the accounts we have of them, the most frugal of modern abstainers) is well known to everyone at all acquainted with ecclesiastical and, especially, eremitical history—and it is unnecessary to further insist upon a notorious fact.[64]

Titus Flavius Clemens, the founder of the famous Alexandrian school of Christian theology, and at once the most learned and most philosophic of all the Christian Fathers, is generally supposed to have been a native of Athens. His Latin name suggests some connexion with the family of Clemens, cousin of the emperor Domitian, who is said to have been put to death for the crime of atheism, as the new religion was commonly termed by the orthodox pagans.

[Pg 58]

He travelled and studied the various philosophies in the East and West. On accepting the Christian faith he sought information in the schools of its most reputed teachers, of whom the name of Pantænus is the only one known to us. At the death of Pantænus, in 190, Clement succeeded to the chair of theology in Alexandria, and at the same time, perhaps, he became a presbyter. He continued to lecture with great reputation till the year 202, when the persecution under Severus forced him to retire from the Egyptian capital. He then took refuge in Palestine, and appears not to have returned to Alexandria. The time and manner of his death are alike unknown. He is supposed to have died in the year 220. Amongst his pupils by far the most famous, hardly second to himself in learning and ability, was Origen, his successor in the Alexandrian professorship.

His three great works are: A Hortatory Discourse Addressed to the Greeks (Λόγος Προτρεπτικὸς πρὸς Ἓλληνας), The Instructor (Paidagogos—strictly, Tutor, or Conductor to school), and the Miscellanies (Stromateis, or Stromata—lit. “Patch-work”).[65] The three works were intended to form a graduated and complete initiation and instruction in Christian theology and ethics. The first is addressed to the pagan Greek world, the second to the recent convert, and in the last he conducts the initiated to the higher gnosis, or knowledge. The Miscellanies originally consisted of eight books, the last of which is lost. The whole series is of unusual value, not only as the record of the opinions of the ablest and most philosophical of the mediators between Greek philosophy and the Christian creed, but also as containing an immense amount of information on Greek life and literature. Eloquence, earnestness, and erudition equally characterise the writings of Clement.

He assumes the name and character of a Gnostic,[66] or philosophic Christian, not in the historical but in his own sense of the word, and professes himself an eclectic—as far as a liberal interpretation of his religion admitted. “By philosophy,” he says,[Pg 59] “I do not mean the Stoic, the Platonic, the Epicurean, or the Aristotelian, but all that has been well said in each of those sects teaching righteousness with religious science—all this selected truth (τοῦτο σύμπαν τὸ ἐκλεκτικὸν) I call philosophy.” Again, he echoes the sentiments of Seneca in lamenting that “we incline more to beliefs that are in repute (τὰ ἔνδοξα), even when they are contradictory, than to the truth” (Miscellanies, i. and vii.). “It would have been well for Christianity if the principles, which he set forth with such an array of profound scholarship and ingenious reasoning, had been adopted more generally by those who came after him.... If anyone, even in a Protestant community, were to assert the liberal and comprehensive principles of the great Father of Alexandria, he would be told that he wished to compromise the distinctive claims of theology, and that he was little better than a heathen and a publican.”[67]

It is in his second treatise, the Instructor or Tutor, that Clement displays his opinions on the subject of flesh-eating:—

Referring to the injunction of Jesus, “When thou makest an entertainment, call the poor,” for “whose sake chiefly a supper ought to be made,” Clement says of the rich:—

[Pg 60]

As to the Jewish laws: “The Jews,” says Clement, “had frugality enjoined on them by the Law in the most systematic manner. For the Instructor, by Moses, deprived them of the use of innumerable things, adding reasons—the spiritual ones hidden, the carnal ones apparent—to which latter, indeed, they have trusted”:—

[Pg 61]

In treating of the subject of sacrifices, upon which he uses a good deal of sarcasm (in regard to the pagan sacrifices at least), Clement incidentally allows us to see, still further, his opinion respecting gross feeding. He quotes several of the Greek poets who ridicule the practice and pretence of sacrificial propitiation, e.g., Menander:—

“If, in fact,” remarks Clement, “the savour is the special desire of the Gods of the Greeks, should they not first deify the cooks, and worship the Chimney itself which is still closer to the much-prized savour?”

The only innocent altar he asserts to be the one allowed by Pythagoras:—

[Pg 62]

He next glances at the popular reason for the Pythagorean abstinence, and declares:—

In a chapter in his Miscellanies, discussing the comparative merits of the Pagan and of the Jewish code of ethics, he displays much eloquence in attempting to prove the superiority of the latter. In the course of his argument he is led to make some acknowledgment of the claims of the lower animals which, however incomplete, is remarkable as being almost unique in Christian theology. He quotes certain of the “Proverbs,” e.g., ‘The merciful man is long-suffering, and in every one who shows solicitude there is wisdom,’ and proceeds (assuming the indebtedness of the Greeks to the Jews):—

Reverting to the Jewish religion, he asserts:—

ONE of the most erudite, as well as one of the most spiritual, of the literati of any age or people, and certainly the most estimable of all the extant Greek philosophers after the days of Plutarch, was born either at Tyre or at some neighbouring town. His original name, Malchus, the Greek form of the Syrian Melech (king), and the name by which he is known to us, Porphyrius (purple-robed), we may well take deservedly to mark his philosophic superiority. He was exceptionally fortunate in his preceptors—Longinus, the most eloquent and elegant of the later Greek critics, under whom he studied at Athens; Origen, the most independent and learned of the Christian Fathers, from whom, probably, he derived his vast knowledge of theological literature; and, finally, Plotinus, the famous founder of New-Platonism, who had established his school at Rome in the year 244.

Upon first joining the school of Plotinus, he had ventured to contest some of the characteristic doctrines of his new teacher, and he even wrote a book to refute them. Amerius, his fellow-disciple,[Pg 64] was chosen to reply to this attack. After a second trial of strength by each antagonist, Amerius, by weight of argument induced Porphyry to confess his errors, and to read his recantation before the assembled Platonists. Porphyry ever after remained an attached and enthusiastic follower of the beloved master, with the final revision and edition of whose voluminous works he was entrusted. He had lived with him six years when, becoming so far unsettled in his mind as even to contemplate suicide in order to free himself from the shackles of the flesh, by the persuasion of his preceptor he made a voyage to Sicily for the restoration of his health and serenity of mind. This was in 270, in the thirty-seventh year of his age. Returning to the capital upon the death of his master, he continued the amiable but vain work of attempting the reform of the established religion, which had then sunk to its lowest degradation, and to this labour of love he may be said to have devoted his whole life. At an advanced age he married Marcella, the widow of one of his friends, who was a Christian and the mother of a rather numerous progeny, with the view, as he tells us, of superintending the education of her children.

About sixty separate works of Porphyry are enumerated by Fabricius, published, unpublished, or lost; the last numbering some forty-three distinct productions. The most important of his writings are—

(1) On Abstinence from the Flesh of Living Beings,[76] in four books, addressed to a certain Firmus Castricius, a Pythagorean, who for some reason or other had become a renegade to the principles, or at least to the practice, of his old faith. Next to the inculcation of abstinence as a spiritual or moral obligation, Porphyry’s “chief object seems to have been to recommend a more spiritual worship in the place of the sacrificial system of the pagan world, with all its false notions and practical abuses. This work,” adds Dr. Donaldson, “is valuable on many accounts, and full of information.”

(2) His criticism on Christianity, which he entitled a Treatise against the Christians—his most celebrated production. It was divided into fifteen books. All our knowledge of it is derived from Eusebius, Jerome, and other ecclesiastical writers. Several years after its appearance the courtly Bishop of Cæsarea, the well-known historian of the first ages of Christianity, replied to it in a work extending to twenty-five books. More than a century later, Theodosius II. caused the obnoxious volume to be publicly burned, and Porphyry’s criticism shared the fate of those[Pg 65] “many elaborate treatises which have since been committed to the flames” by the theological or political zeal of orthodox emperors and princes.[77]

(3) The Life of Pythagoras—a fragment, but, as far as it goes, the most interesting of the Pythagorean biographies.

(4) On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of his Works. It is to this biography we are indebted for our knowledge of the estimable elaborator of New-Platonism. We learn that he was the pupil of Ammonius, who disputes with Numenius the fame of having originated the principles of the new school of thought of which Plotinus, however, was the St. Paul—the actual founder. Of a naturally feeble constitution, he had early betaken himself to the consolations of divine philosophy. After vainly seeking rest for his truth-loving and aspiring spirit in other systems, he at last found in Ammonius the teacher and teaching which his intellectual and spiritual sympathies demanded. His great ambition was to visit the country of Buddha and of Zerdusht or Zoroaster, and, for that purpose, he joined the expedition of the Emperor Gordian against the Persians. The defeat and death of that prince frustrated his plans. He then settled at Rome, where he established his school, and he remained in Italy until his death in 270. By the earnest solicitations of his disciples, Porphyry and Amerius, he was induced with much reluctance to publish his oral discourses, and eventually they appeared in fifty-four books, edited by Porphyry, who gave them the name of the Enneads, as being arranged in six groups of nine treatises. Perhaps no teacher ever engaged to so unbounded an extent the admiration and affection of his followers.

[Pg 66]

The “practical common sense” (which usually may be interpreted to mean cynical indifferentism), of the statesmen and politicians of the day interposed to prevent this attempt at a realisation of Plato’s great ideal; and, considering the prematurity of such ideas in the then condition of the world—and, it must be added, the extravagance of some of them—we can, perhaps, hardly regret that his “Republic” was never instituted. As to the essence and spirit of the teaching of Plotinus,

The personal humility of this sublime teacher, we may add, seems to have equalled the loftiness of his inspiration.

Of the other writings of Porphyry, space allows us to refer only to his Epistle to Anebo—a critical refutation of some of the popular prejudices of Pagan theology, such as the grosser dæmonism, necromancy, and incantation,[78] and, above all, animal sacrifice, to which his keen spiritual sense was essentially antagonistic. It is known only by fragments preserved in Eusebius. As to the theological or metaphysical opinions of Porphyry, “it is clear,” remarks Dr. Donaldson,[Pg 67] “that he had but little faith in the old polytheism of the Greeks. He expressly tells his wife (Letter to Marcella) that outward worship does neither good nor harm.” In truth, as regards the better parts of Christianity, he was nearer to the religion of Jesus than of Jupiter, although he found himself in opposition to what he considered the evils or errors of dogmatic Christian theology. In common with most of the principal expounders of Neo-Platonism,[79] his sympathies were with much that was contained in the Christian Scriptures, and, in particular, with the fourth Gospel, the sublime beginning of which, we are assured, the disciples of Plato regarded as “an exact transcript of their own opinions,” and which, as St. Augustin informs us (De Civ. Dei x., 29), they declared to be worthy to be written in letters of gold, and inscribed in the most conspicuous place in every Christian church.

As for the learning, as well as lofty ideas, of the author of the treatise On Abstinence, there has been a general consensus of opinion even from his theological opponents. Augustin, himself among the most learned of the Latin Fathers, styles him doctissimus philosophorum (“the most learned of the philosophers”), and, again, philosophus nobilis (“a noble philosopher”), “a man of no common mind” (De Civit. Dei); and elsewhere he calls him “the great philosopher of the heathen.” Even Eusebius, his immediate antagonist, concedes to him the titles of “the noble philosopher,” “the wonderful theologian,” “the great prophet of ineffable doctrines” (ὁ τῶν ἀποῤῥητων μύστης). Donaldson, endorsing the common admiration of the moderns, describes his learning and erudition as “stupendous.”

Amongst modern testimonies to the merits of Porphyry’s treatise, On Abstinence, the sympathising remarks of Voltaire are worth transcribing:—

Of this famous treatise there is, it appears, only one English translation, that of Taylor (1851), long out of print; and there is a German version by Herr Ed. Baltzer, President of the Vegetarian Society of Germany; thus we have to lament for Porphyry, no less than for Plutarch, the indifferentism of the publishers, or rather of the public, which allows a production, of an inspiration far above that of the common herd of writers, to continue to be a sealed book for the community in general.

It has been already stated that it consists of four Divisions. The first treats of Abstinence from the point of view of Temperance and Reason. In the second is considered the lawfulness or otherwise of animal sacrifice. In the third Porphyry treats the subject from the side of Justice. In the fourth he reviews the practice of some of the nations of antiquity and of the East—of the Egyptians, Hindus, and others. This last Book, by its abrupt termination, is evidently unfinished.

[Pg 69]

Porphyry begins with an expression of surprise and regret at the apostasy of the Pythagorean renegade:—

He expresses his hope, or rather his belief, that, at least, the lapse was not due in this case to natural intemperance, or regret for the gluttonous habits (λαιμαργίας) of flesh-eating.

He then proceeds to quote and refute the fallacies of the ordinary systems and sects, and, in particular, the objections of one Clodius, a Neapolitan, who had published a treatise against Pythagoreanism. He professes that he does not hope to influence those who are engaged in sordid and selfish, or in sanguinary, pursuits. Rather he addresses himself to the man

In condemning animal sacrifice, he declares that “it is by means of an exalted and purified intellect alone that we can approximate to the Supreme Being, to whom nothing material should be offered.” He distinguishes four degrees of virtue, the lowest being that of the man who attempts to moderate his passions; the highest, the life of pure reason, by which man becomes one with the Supreme Existence.

In the third book, maintaining that other animals are endowed with high degrees of reasoning and of mental faculties, and, in some measure,[Pg 70] even with moral perception, Porphyry proceeds logically to insist that they are, therefore, the proper objects of Justice:—

Porphyry, it is scarcely necessary to remark, by these arguments proves himself to have been, in moral as well as mental perception, as far ahead of the average thinkers of the present day as he was of his own times. He justly maintains that

To the objection of Chrysippus (the second founder of the school of the Porch) that the gods made us for themselves and for the sake of each other, and that they made the non-human species for us—a convenient subterfuge by no means unknown to writers and talkers of our own times—Porphyry unanswerably replies:—

Porphyry unanswerably and eloquently concludes this division of his subject with the à fortiori argument:—

In fine, according to Porphyry, he who extends his sympathies to all innocent life is nearest to the Divine nature. Well would it have been for all the after-ages had this, the only sure foundation of any code of ethics worthy of the name, found favour with the constituted instructors and rulers of the western world. The fourth and final Book reviews the dietetic habits of some of the leading peoples of antiquity, and of certain of the philosophic societies which practised abstinence more or less rigidly. As for the Essenes, Porphyry describes their code of morals and manner of living in terms of high praise. We can here give only an abstract of his eloquent eulogium:—

The testimony of the national historian of the Jews, it is interesting to observe, is equally favourable to those pioneers of the modern communisms. “The Essenes, as we call a sect of ours,” writes Josephus,[Pg 73] “pursue the same kind of life as those whom the Greeks call Pythagoreans. They are long-lived also, insomuch that many of them exist above a hundred years by means of their simplicity of diet and the regular course of their lives” (Antiquities of the Jews.). Upon entering the society and partaking of the common meal (which, with baptism, was the outward and visible sign of initiation) three solemn oaths were administered to each aspirant:—

As for their food, while they seem not to have been bound to total abstinence from every kind of flesh, they may be considered to have been almost Vegetarian in practice. To kill any innocent individual of the non-human species that had sought refuge or an asylum amongst them was a breach of the most sacred laws: to spare the domesticated races, or fellow-workers with man, even in an enemy’s country, was a solemn duty. For, says Porphyry, their founder had no groundless fear that there could be any overabundance of life productive of famine to ourselves, inasmuch as he knew, first, that those animals who bring forth many young at a time are short lived, and, secondly, that their too rapid increase is kept down by other hostile animals. “A proof of which is,” he continues, “that though we abstain from eating very many, such as dogs, wild beasts, rats, lizards, and others, there is yet no fear that we should ever suffer from famine in consequence of their excessive multiplication; and, again, it is one thing to have to kill, and another to eat, since we have to kill many ferocious animals whom we do not also eat.”

He quotes the historians of Syria who allege that, in the earlier period, the inhabitants of that part of the world abstained from all flesh, and, therefore, from sacrifice; and that when, afterwards, to avert some impending misfortune they were induced to offer up propitiatory victims, the practice of flesh-eating was by no means general. And Asklepiades says, in his History of Cyprus and Phœnicia, that “no living being was sacrificed to heaven, nor was there even any express law on the subject, since it was forbidden by the law of Nature (νομῷ φυσικῷ):” that, in course of time, they took to occasional propitiatory sacrifice: and that, at one of these times, the sacrificing priest happened to place his blood-smeared finger on his mouth, was tempted to repeat the action, and thus[Pg 74] introduced the habit of flesh-eating, whence the general practice. As for the Persian Magi (the successors of Zerdusht), we are informed that the principal and most esteemed of their order neither eat nor kill any living being, while those of the second class eat the flesh of some, but not of domesticated, animals; nor do even the third order eat indiscriminately. Instances are adduced of certain peoples who, being compelled by necessity to live upon flesh, have evidently deteriorated and been rendered savage and ferocious, “from which examples it is clearly unbecoming men of good disposition to belie their human nature (τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης καταψεύδεσθαι φύσεως).”

Amongst individuals he instances the example of the traditionary Athenian legislator Triptolemus—

Somewhat later than Porphyry, the name of Julian (331–363), the Roman emperor, may here be fitly introduced. During his brief reign of sixteen months he proved himself, if not always a judicious, yet a sincere and earnest reformer of abuses of various kinds, and he may claim to be one of the very few virtuous princes, pagan or christian. Unfortunately the just blame attaching to his ill-judged attempt to suppress the religion of Constantine, from whose family his relatives and himself had suffered the greatest injury and insult, has enabled the lovers of party rather than of truth successfully to conceal from view his undoubted merits.

In his manner of living, with which alone we are now concerned, he seems to have almost rivalled the most ascetic of the Platonists or of the Christian anchorets. One of his most intimate friends, the celebrated[Pg 75] orator, Libanius, who had often shared the frugal simplicity of his table, has remarked that his “light and sparing diet, which was usually of the vegetable kind, left his mind and body always free and active for the various and important business of an author, a pontiff, a magistrate, a general, and a prince.” That his frugal diet had not impaired his powers, either physical or mental, may sufficiently appear from the fact that—

Following the principles of Platonism,[Pg 76] “he justly concluded that the man who presumes to reign should aspire to the perfection of the divine nature—that he should purify his soul from her mortal and terrestrial part—that he should extinguish his appetites, enlighten his understanding, regulate his passions, and subdue the wild beast which, according to the lively metaphor of Aristotle, seldom fails to ascend the throne of a despot.” With all these virtues, unfortunately for his credit as a philosopher and humanitarian, the imperial Stoic allowed his natural goodness of heart to be corrupted by superstition and fanaticism. Conceiving himself to be the special and chosen instrument of the Deity for the restoration of the fallen religion, which he regarded as the true faith, he made it the foremost object of his pious but misdirected ambition to re-establish its sumptuous temples, priesthoods, and sacrificial altars with all their imposing ritual, and “he was heard to declare, with the enthusiasm of a missionary, that if he could render each individual richer than Midas and every city greater than Babylon, he should not esteem himself the benefactor of mankind, unless at the same time he could reclaim his subjects from their impious revolt against the immortal gods.”[90] Inspired by this religious zeal, he forgot the maxims of his master, Plato, so far as to rival, if not surpass, the ancient Jewish or Pagan ritual in the number of the sacrificial victims offered up in the name of religion and of the Deity. Happily for the future of the world, the fanatical piety of this youthful champion of the religion of Homer proved ineffectual to turn back the slow onward march of the Western mind, through fearful mazes of evil and error indeed, towards that “diviner day” which is yet to dawn for the Earth.

THE most eloquent, and one of the most estimable, of the “Fathers” was born at Antioch, the Christian city par excellence. His family held a distinguished position, and his father was in high command in the Syrian division of the imperial army. He studied for the law, and was instructed in oratory by the famous rhetorician Libanius (the intimate friend and counsellor of the young Emperor Julian), who pronounced his pupil worthy to succeed to his chair, if he had not adopted the Christian faith. He soon gave up the law for theology, and retired to a monastery, near Antioch, where he passed four years, rigidly abstaining from flesh-meat and, like the Essenes, abandoning the rights of private property and living a life of the strictest asceticism.

[Pg 77]

Having submitted himself in solitude to the severest austerities during a considerable length of time, he entered the Church, and soon gained the highest reputation for his extraordinary eloquence and zeal. On the death of the Archbishop of Constantinople, he was unanimously elected to fill the vacant Primacy. The nolo me episcopari seems, in his case, to have been no unmeaning formula. His beneficence and charity in the new position attracted general admiration. From the revenues of his See he founded a hospital for the sick—one of the very first of those rather modern institutions. The fame of the “Golden-mouthed” drew to his cathedral immense crowds of people, who before had frequented the theatre and the circus rather than the churches, and the building constantly resounded with their enthusiastic plaudits. He was, however, no mere popular preacher; he fearlessly exposed the corrupt and selfish life of the large body of the clergy. At one time he deposed, it is said, no less than thirteen bishops, in Lesser Asia, from their Sees; and in one of his Homilies he does not hesitate to charge “the whole ecclesiastical body with avarice and licentiousness, asserting that the number of bishops who could be saved bore a very small proportion to those who would be damned.”[91]

At length, his repeated denunciations of the too notorious scandals of the Court and the Church excited the bitter enmity of his brother-prelates, and, by their intrigues at the Imperial Court of Constantinople, he was deposed from his See and exiled to the wildest parts of the Euxine coasts, where, exposed to every sort of privation, he caught a violent fever and died. So far did the hostility of the Episcopacy extend, that one of his rivals, a bishop, named Theophilus, in a book expressly written against him, amongst other vituperative epithets had proceeded to the length of styling him “a filthy demon,” and of solemnly consigning his soul to Satan. With the poor, however, Chrysostom enjoyed unbounded popularity and esteem. His greatest fault was his theological intolerance—a fault, it is just to add, of the age rather than of the man.

The writings of Chrysostom are exceedingly voluminous—700 homilies, orations, doctrinal treatises, and 242 epistles. Their “chief value consists in the illustrations they furnish of the manners of the fourth and fifth centuries—of the moral and social state of the period. The circus, spectacles, theatres, baths, houses, domestic economy, banquets, dresses, fashions, pictures, processions, tight-rope dancing, funerals—in fine, everything has a place in the picture of licentious luxury which it is the object of Chrysostom to denounce.” Next to his profession of[Pg 78] faith in the efficacy and virtues of a non-flesh diet, amongst the most interesting of his productions is his Golden Book on the education of the young. He recommends that children should be inured to habits of temperance, by abstaining, at least, twice a week from the ordinary grosser food with which they are supplied. As might be expected from the age, and from his order, the practice of Chrysostom, and of the numerous other ecclesiastical abstinents from the gross diet of the richer part of the community, reposed upon ascetic and traditionary principles, rather than on the more secular and modern motives of justice, humanity, and general social improvement. So, in fact, Origen, one of the most learned of the Fathers, expressly says (Contra Celsum, v.): “We [the Christian leaders] practise abstinence from the flesh of animals to buffet our bodies and treat them as slaves (ὑπωπιάζομεν καί δουλαγωγοῦμεν), and we wish to mortify our members upon earth,” &c.

Accordingly, the Apostolical Canons distinguished, as Bingham (Antiquities of the Christian Church) reports them, between abstinents, διὰ τὴν ἀσκησιν and διὰ τὴν βδελυπίαν, i.e., between those who abstained to exercise self-control, and those who did so from disgust and abhorrence of what, in ordinary and orthodox language, are too complacently and confidently termed “the good creatures of God.” This distinction, it must be added, holds only of the prevailing sentiment of the Orthodox Church as finally established. During several centuries—even so late as the Paulicians in the seventh, or even as the Albigeois of the thirteenth, century—Manicheism, as it is called, or a belief in the inherent evil of all matter, was widely spread in large and influential sections of the Christian Church—nor, indeed, were some of its most famous Fathers without suspicion of this heretical taint. According to the Clementine Homilies, “the unnatural eating of flesh-meat is of demoniacal origin, and was introduced by those giants who, from their bastard nature, took no pleasure in pure nourishment, and only lusted after blood. Therefore the eating of flesh is as polluting as the heathen worship of demons, with its sacrifices and its impure feasts; through participation in which, a man becomes a fellow-dietist (ὁμοδίαιτος) with demons.”[92] That superstition was often, in the minds of the followers both of Plato and of St. Paul, mixed up with, and, indeed, usually dominated over, the reasonable motives of the more philosophic advocates of the higher life, there can be no sort of doubt; nor can we claim a monopoly of rational motives for the mass of the adherents of either Christian or Pythagorean abstinence. Yet an impartial judgment must allow almost equal credit to the earnestness of mind and purity of motive[Pg 79] which, mingled though they undoubtedly were with (in the pre-scientific ages) a necessary infusion of superstition, urged the followers of the better way—Christian and non-Christian—to discard the “social lies” of the dead world around them. At all events, it is not for the selfish egoists to sneer at the sublime—if error-infected—efforts of the earlier pioneers of moral progress for their own and the world’s redemption from the bonds of the prevailing vile materialism in life and dietary habits.

We have already shown that the earliest Jewish-Christian communities, both in Palestine and elsewhere—the immediate disciples of the original Twelve—enjoined abstinence as one of the primary obligations of the New Faith; and that the earliest traditions represent the foremost of them as the strictest sort of Vegetarians.[93] If then we impartially review the history of the practice, the teaching, and the traditions of the first Christian authorities, it cannot but appear surprising that the Orthodox Church, ignoring the practice and highest ideal of the most sacred period of its annals, has, even within its own Order, deemed it consistent with its claim of being representative of the Apostolic period to substitute partial and periodic for total and constant abstinence.

The following passages in the Homilies, or Congregational Discourses, of Chrysostom will serve as specimens of his feeling on the propriety of dietary reform. The eloquent but diffusive style of the Greek Bossuet, it must be noted, is necessarily but feebly represented in the literal English version:—

[Pg 80]

Again he protests:—

Denouncing the grossness of the ordinary mode of living, he eloquently descants on the evil results, physical as well as mental:—

From this period—the fifth century A.D. down to the sixteenth—Christian and Western literature contains little or nothing which comes within the purpose of this work. The merits of monastic asceticism were more or less preached during all those ages, although constant abstinence from flesh was by no means the general practice even with[Pg 82] the inmates of the stricter monastic or conventual establishments—at all events in the Latin Church. But we look in vain for traces of anything like the humanitarian feeling of Plutarch or Porphyry. The mental intelligence as well as capacities for physical suffering of the non-human races—necessarily resulting from an organisation in all essential points like to our own—was apparently wholly ignored; their just rights and claims upon human justice were disregarded and trampled under foot. Consistently with the universal estimate, they were treated as beings destitute of all feeling—as if, in fine, they are the “automatic machines” they are alleged to be by the Cartesians of the present day. In those terrible ages of gross ignorance, of superstition, of violence, and of injustice—in which human rights were seldom regarded—it would have been surprising indeed if any sort of regard had been displayed for the non-human slaves. And yet an underlying and latent consciousness of the falseness of the general estimate sometimes made itself apparent in certain extraordinary and perverse fancies.[98] To Montaigne, the first to revive the humanitarianism of Plutarch, belongs the great merit of reasserting the natural rights of the helpless slaves of human tyranny.

While Chrysostom seems to have been one of the last of Christian writers who manifested any sort of consciousness of the inhuman, as well as unspiritual nature of the ordinary gross foods, Platonism continued to bear aloft the flickering torch of a truer spiritualism; and “the golden chain” of the prophets of the dietary reformation reached down even so late as to the end of the sixth century. Hierokles, author of the commentary on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, to which reference has already been made, and who lectured upon them with great success at Alexandria; Hypatia, the beautiful and accomplished daughter of Theon the great mathematician, who publicly taught the philosophy of Plato at the same great centre of Greek science and learning, and was barbarously murdered by the jealousy of her Christian rival Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria; Proklus, surnamed the Successor, as having been considered the most illustrious disciple of Plato in the latter times, who left several treatises upon the Pythagorean system, and “whose sagacious mind explored the deepest questions of morals and metaphysics”;[99] Olympiodorus, who wrote a life of Plato and commentaries on several of his dialogues, still extant, and lived in the reign of Justinian,[Pg 83] by whose edict the illustrious school of Athens was finally closed, and with it the last vestiges of a sublime, if imperfect, attempt at the purification of human life—such are some of the most illustrious names which adorned the days of expiring Greek philosophy. Olympiodorus and six other Pythagoreans determined, if possible, to maintain their doctrines elsewhere; and they sought refuge with the Persian Magi, with whose tenets, or, at least, manner of living, they believed themselves to be most in accord. The Persian customs were distasteful to the purer ideal of the Platonists, and, disappointed in other respects, they reluctantly relinquished their fond hopes of transplanting the doctrines of Plato into a foreign soil, and returned home. The Persian prince, Chosroes, we may add, acquired honour by his stipulation with the bigoted Justinian, that the seven sages should be allowed to live unmolested during the rest of their days. “Simplicius and his companions ended their lives in peace and obscurity; and, as they left no disciples, they terminated the long list of Grecian philosophers who may be justly praised, notwithstanding their defects, as the wisest and most virtuous of their contemporaries. The writings of Simplicius are now extant. His physical and metaphysical commentaries on Aristotle have passed away with the fashion of the times, but his moral interpretation of Epiktetus is preserved in the library of nations as a classical book excellently adapted to direct the will, to purify the heart, and to confirm the understanding, by a just confidence in the nature both of God and Man.”[100]

AFTER the extinction of Greek and Latin philosophy in the fifth century, a mental torpor seized upon and, during some thousand years, with rare exceptions, dominated the whole Western world. When this torpor was dispelled by the influence of returning knowledge and[Pg 84] reason evoked by the various simultaneous discoveries in science and literature—in particular by the achievements of Gutenberg, Vasco da Gama, Christopher Colon, and, above all, Copernik—the moral sense then first, too, began to show signs of life. The renascence of the sixteenth century, however, with all the vigour of thought and action which accompanied it, proved to be rather a revival of mere verbal learning than of the higher moral feeling of the best minds of old Greece and Italy. Men, fettered as they were in the trammels of theological controversy and metaphysical subtleties, for the most part expended their energies and their intellect in the vain pursuit of phantoms. With the very few splendid exceptions of the more enlightened and earnest thinkers, Ethics, in the real and comprehensive meaning of the word, was an unknown science; and a long period of time was yet to pass away before a perception of the universal obligations of Justice and of Right dawned upon the minds of men. In truth, it could not have been otherwise. Before the moral instincts can be developed, reason and knowledge must have sufficiently prepared the way. When attention to the importance of the neglected science of Dietetics had been in some degree aroused, the interest evoked was little connected with the higher sentiments of humanity.

Of all dietary reformers who have treated the subject from an exclusively sanitarian point of view, the most widely known and most popular name, perhaps, has been that of Luigi Cornaro; and it is as a vehement protester against the follies, rather than against the barbarism, of the prevailing dietetic habits that he claims a place in this work. He belonged to one of the leading families of Venice, then at the height of its political power. Even in an age and in a city noted for luxuriousness and grossness of living of the rich and dominant classes, he had in his youth distinguished himself by his licentious habits in eating and drinking, as well as by other excesses. His constitution had been so impaired, and he had brought upon himself so many disorders by this course of living, that existence became a burden to him. He informs us that from his thirty-fifth to his fortieth year he passed his nights and days in continuous suffering. Every sort of known remedy was exhausted before his new medical adviser, superior to the prejudices of his profession and of the public, had the courage and the good sense to prescribe a total change of diet. At first Cornaro found his enforced regimen almost intolerable, and, as he tells us, he occasionally relapsed.

These relapses brought back his old sufferings, and, to save his life, he was driven at length to practise entire and uniform abstinence, the yolk of an egg often furnishing him the whole of his meal. In this way he assures us that he came to relish dry bread more than formerly he[Pg 85] had enjoyed the most exquisite dishes of the ordinary table. At the end of the first year he found himself entirely freed from all his multiform maladies. In his eighty-third year he wrote and published his first exhortation to a radical change of diet under the title of A Treatise on a Sober Life,[101] in which he eloquently narrates his own case, and exhorts all who value health and immunity from physical or mental sufferings to follow his example. And his exordium, in which he takes occasion to denounce the waste and gluttony of the dinners of the rich, might be applied with little, or without any, modification of its language to the public and private tables of the present day:—

He tells us that he had undertaken his arduous task of proselytising with the more anxiety and zeal that he had been encouraged to it by many of his friends, men of “the finest intellect” (di bellissimo intelletto), who lamented the premature deaths of parents and relatives, and who observed so manifest a proof of the advantages of abstinence in the robust and vigorous frame of the dietetic missionary at the age of eighty. Cornaro was a thorough-going hygeist, and he followed a reformed diet in the widest meaning of the term, attending to the various requirements of a healthy condition of mind and body:—

At the age of seventy a serious accident befel him, which to the vast majority of men so far advanced in life would probably have been fatal. His coach was overturned, and he was dragged a considerable distance along the road before the horses could be stopped. He was taken up insensible, covered with severe wounds and bruises and with an arm and leg dislocated, and altogether he was in so dangerous a state that his physicians gave him only three days to live. As a matter of course they prescribed bleeding and purging as the only proper and effectual remedies:—

[Pg 87]

It is, perhaps, hardly to be expected that “The Faculty” will endorse the opinions of Cornaro, that any person by attending strictly to his regimen “could never be sick again, as it removes every cause of illness; and so, for the future, would never want either physician or physic”:—

Cornaro’s second publication appeared three years later than his first, under the title of A Compendium of a Sober Life and the third, An Earnest Exhortation to a Sober and Regular Life,[103] in the ninety-third year of his age. In these little treatises he repeats and enforces in the most earnest manner his previous exhortations and warnings. He also takes the opportunity of exposing some of the plausible sophisms employed in defence of luxurious living:—

Amongst others:—

Cornaro frequently interrupts his discourse with apostrophes to the genius of Temperance, in which he seems to be at a loss for words to express his feeling of gratitude and thankfulness for the marvellous change effected in his constitution, by which he had been delivered from the terrible load of sufferings of his earlier life, and by which moreover he could fully appreciate, as he had never dreamed before, the beauties and charms of nature of the external world, as well as develope the mental faculties with which he had been endowed:—

The fourth and last of his appearances in print was a “Letter to Barbaro, Patriarch of Aquileia,” written at the age of ninety-five. It describes in a very lively manner the health, vigour, and use of all his faculties of mind and body, of which he had the perfect enjoyment. He was far advanced in life when his daughter, his only child, was born, and[Pg 89] he lived to see her an old woman. He informs us, at the age of ninety-one, with much eloquence and enthusiasm of the active interest and pleasure he experienced in all that concerned the prosperity of his native city: of his plans for improving its port; for draining, recovering, and fertilizing the extensive marshes and barren sands in its neighbourhood. He died, having passed his one hundredth year, calmly and easily in his arm-chair at Padua in the year 1566.[104] His treatises, forming a small volume, have been “very frequently published in Italy, both in the vernacular Italian and in Latin. It has been translated into all the civilised languages of Europe, and was once a most popular book. There are several English translations of it, the best being one that bears the date 1779. Cornaro’s system,” says the writer in the English Cyclopædia whom we are quoting, “has had many followers.” Recounting his many dignities and honours, and the distinguished part he took in the improvement of his native city, by which he acquired a great reputation amongst his fellow-citizens, the Italian editor of his writings justly adds:—

Addison (Spectator 195) thus refers to him:—

[Pg 90]

In fact he has exposed himself, it must be confessed, to the taunts of the “devotees of the Table” often cast at the abstinents, that they are too much given to parading their health and vigour, and certainly if any one can be justly obnoxious to them it is Luigi Cornaro.

DURING part of the period covered by the long life of Cornaro there is one distinguished man, all reference to whose opinions—intimately though indirectly connected as they are with dietary reform—it would be improper to omit—Sir Thomas More. His eloquent denunciation of the grasping avarice and the ruinous policy which were rapidly converting the best part of the country into grazing lands, as well as his condemnation of the slaughter of innocent life, commonly euphemised by the name of “sport,” are as instructive and almost as necessary for the present age as for the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Son of Sir John More, a judge of the King’s Bench, he was brought up in the palace of the Cardinal Lord Chancellor Morton, an ecclesiastic who stands out in favourable contrast with the great majority of his order, and, indeed, of his contemporaries in general. In his twenty-first year he was returned to the House of Commons, where he distinguished himself by opposing a grant of a subsidy to the king (Henry VII.). In 1516 he published (in Latin) his world-famed Utopia—the most meritorious production in sociological literature since the days of Plutarch. In 1523 he was elected Speaker of the House of Commons, and again he displayed his courage and integrity in resisting an illegal and oppressive subsidy bill, by which he was not in the way to advance his interests with Henry VIII. and his principal minister, Wolsey. Seven years later, however, upon the disgrace of the latter personage, Sir Thomas More succeeded to the vacant Chancellorship, in which office he maintained his reputation for integrity and laborious diligence. When the amorous and despotic king had determined upon the momentous divorce from Catherine, he resigned the Seals rather than sanction that[Pg 91] equivocal proceeding; and soon afterwards he was sent to the Tower for refusing the Oath of Supremacy. After the interval of a year he was brought to trial before the King’s Bench, and sentenced to the block (1535). In private life and in his domestic relations he exhibits a pleasing contrast to the ordinary harsh severity of his contemporaries. In learning and ability he occupies a foremost place in the annals of the period.

Unfortunately for his reputation with after ages, as Lord Chancellor he seems to have forgotten the maxims of toleration (political and theological) of his earlier career, so well set forth in his Utopia; and he supplies a notable instance, not too rare, of retrogression with advancing years and dignities, and of “a head grown grey in vain.” In fact, he belonged, ecclesiastically, to the school of conservative sceptics, of whom his intimate friend Erasmus was the most conspicuous representative, rather than to the party of practical reform. Yet, in spite of so lamentable a failure in practical philosophy, More may claim a high degree of merit both for his courage and for his sagacity in propounding views far in advance of his time.

In the Utopia his ideas in regard to labour and to crime exhibit him, indeed, as in advance of the received dogmas even of the present day. As to the former he held that the labourer, as the actual basis and support of the whole social system, was justly entitled to some consideration, and to a more rational existence than usually allowed him by the policy of the ruling classes; and, in limiting the daily period of labour to nine hours, he anticipated by 350 years the tardy legislation on that important matter. In exposing the equal absurdity and iniquity of the criminal code he preached the despised doctrine of prevention rather than punishment, and denounced the monstrous inequality of penalties by which thieving was placed in the same category with murder and crimes of violence:—

What we are immediately concerned with here is his feeling in regard to slaughter. The Utopians condemn—

[Pg 92]

In telling us that his model people “permit not their free citizens to accustom themselves to the killing of ‘beasts’ through the use whereof they think clemency, gentlest affection of our nature, by little and little to decay and perish,”[107] More for ever condemns the immorality of the Slaughter-House, whether he intended to do so in toto or no. In relegating the business of slaughter to their bondsmen (criminals who had been degraded from the rights of citizenship), the Utopians, we may observe, exhibit less of justice than of refinement. To devolve the trade of slaughter upon a pariah-class is not the least immoral of the necessary concomitants of the shambles. That the author of Utopia should feel an instinctive aversion from the coarseness and cruelty of the shambles is not surprising; that he should have failed to banish it entirely from his ideal commonwealth is less to be wondered at[Pg 93] than to be lamented. That he had at least a latent consciousness of the indefensibility of slaughter for food appears sufficiently clear from his remark upon the Utopian religion that “they kill no living animal in sacrifice, nor do they think that God has delight in blood and slaughter, Who has given life to animals to the intent they should live.”

Wiser than ourselves, the ideal people do not waste their corn in the manufacture of alcoholic drinks:—

The selfish policy of converting arable into grazing land is emphatically denounced by More:—

These sagacious and just reflections upon the evil social consequences of carnivorousness may be fitly commended to the earnest attention of our public writers and speakers of to-day. The periodical cattle plagues and foot-and-mouth diseases, which, in theological language, are vaguely assigned to national sins, might be more ingenuously and truthfully attributed to the one sufficient cause—to the general indulgence of selfish instincts, which closes the ear to all the promptings at once of humanity and of reason, and is, in truth, a national sin of the most serious character.[108]

[Pg 94]

The “wisdom of our ancestors,” which has been so often invoked, both before and since the days of More, and which Bentham has so mercilessly exposed, apparently did not subdue the reason of the author of Utopia; yet, with no little amount of applause it has been made to serve as a very conclusive argument against dietetic reformation, as against many other changes:—

THE modern Plutarch and the first of essayists deserves his place in this work, if not so much for express and explicit denunciation, totidem verbis, of the barbarism of the Slaughter-House, at least for a sort of argument which logically and necessarily arrives at the same conclusion. In truth, if he had not “seen and approved the better way” (even though, with too many others, he may not have had the courage of his convictions), he would be no true disciple of the great humanitarian. It is necessary to remember that the “perfect day” was not yet come; that a few rays only here and there enlightened the thick darkness of barbarism; that, in fine, not even yet, with the light of truth shining full upon us, have reason and conscience triumphed, as regards the mass of the community, either in this country or elsewhere.

Michel de Montaigne descended from an old and influential house in Périgord (modern Périgeaux, in the department of the Dordogne). His youth was carefully trained, and his early inclination to learning fostered under his father’s diligent superintendence. He became a member of the provincial parliament, and, by the universal suffrage of his fellow-citizens, was elected chief magistrate of Bordeaux, from the official routine of whose duties he soon retired to the more congenial atmosphere[Pg 95] of study and philosophic reflection. In his château, at Montaigne, his studious tranquillity was violently interrupted by the savage contests then raging between the opposing factions of Catholics and Huguenots, from both of whom he received ill-treatment and loss. To add to his troubles, the plague, which appeared in Guienne in 1586, broke up his household and compelled him, with his family, to abandon his home. Together they wandered through the country, exposed to the various dangers of a civil war; and he afterwards for some time settled in Paris. He had also travelled in Italy. Montaigne returned to his home when the disturbances and atrocities had somewhat subsided, and there he died with the philosophic calmness with which he had lived.

The Essais—that book of “good faith,” “without study and artifice,” as its author justly calls it—appeared in the year 1580. It is a book unique in modern literature, and the only other production to which it may be compared is the Moralia of Plutarch. “It is not a book we are reading, but a conversation to which we are listening.” “It is,” as another French critic observes, “less a book than a journal divided into chapters, which follow one another without connexion, which bear each a title without much regard to the fulfilment of their promise.”

Montaigne treats of almost every phase of human thought and action; and upon every subject he has something original and worth saying. Living in a savagely sectarian and persecuting age, he kept himself aloof and independent of either of the two contending theological sections, and contents himself with the rôle of a sceptical spectator. It must be admitted that he is not always satisfactory in this character, since he sometimes seems to give forth an “uncertain sound.” Considering the age, however, his assertion of the proper authority of Reason deserves our respectful admiration, and is in pleasing contrast with the attitude of most of his contemporaries. A few, like his friend De Thou, or the Italian Giordano Bruno—the latter of whom, indeed, had more of the martyr-spirit than Montaigne—contributed to keep alight the torch of Truth and Reason. But we have only to recollect that it was the age par excellence of Diabolism in Catholic and Protestant theology alike, and of all the horrible superstitions and frightful tortures, both bodily and mental, of which the universal belief in the Devil’s actual reign on earth was the fruitful cause. About the very time of the appearance of the Essais, one of the most learned men of the period, the lawyer Jean Bodin published a work which he called the Démonomanie des Sorciers (the “Diabolic Inspiration of Witches”), in which he protested his unwavering faith in the most monstrous beliefs of the creed, and vehemently called upon the judges, ecclesiastical and civil, to punish the[Pg 96] reputed criminals (accused of an impossible crime) with the severest tortures. We have only to recognise this fact alone (the most astounding of all the astounding facts and phases in the history of Superstition) to do full justice to the reason and courage of this small band of protesters.

As for the influence of Montaigne on the modes of thought of after times, and especially of his countrymen, it can scarcely be over estimated. He is the literary progenitor of the most famous French writers of the humanitarian eighteenth century. The most eminent of them, Voltaire, perhaps, most resembles him, but naturally the style of the eighteenth century philosopher is more concise and incisive, and his opinions are more pronounced. “Both,” says a French critic, “laugh at the human species; but the laughter of Voltaire is more bitter; his railleries are more terrible. Both, nevertheless, breathe the love of humanity. That of Voltaire is more ardent, more courageous, more unwearied. The hatred of both of them for charlatanism and hypocrisy is well known. Their morality has for its first principle benevolence towards others, without distinction of country, of manners, or of religious beliefs; warning us not to think that we alone hold the deposit of justice and of truth. It transports our soul, by contempt of mortal things and by enthusiasm for great truths.” It is to be lamented that the countrymen of Montaigne and of Voltaire have not profited to a larger extent by their humanitarian teaching and tendencies. In reference to the almost incredible atrocities of war, and especially of civil war, Montaigne protests:—

Quoting instances of the extreme respect in which some of the non-human races were held by people in Antiquity,[113] and Plutarch’s interpretation of the meaning of the divine honours sometimes paid to them—that they adored certain qualities in them as types of divine faculties—Montaigne declares for himself that:—

Wiser than the majority in later times, Montaigne well rebukes the arrogant presumption of the human animal who affects to hold all other life to be brought into being for his sole use and pleasure:—

Montaigne quotes the example of his master, the just and benevolent Plutarch, who made it a matter of justice and conscience not to sell or send to the slaughter-house (according to the common selfish ingratitude) a Cow who had served him faithfully and profitably for so many years. With Plutarch and Porphyry he never wearies of denouncing the unreasoning opinions, or rather prejudices, prevalent amongst men as to the mental qualities of many of the non-human races, and, as we have already seen, insists that the difference between them and us is of degree and not of kind:—

Rejecting the still received prejudice which will not allow our humble fellow-beings the privilege of reason, but invents an imaginary faculty called “instinct,” he repeats that—

GASSENDI, one of the most eminent men, and, what is more to the purpose, the most meritorious philosophic writer of France in the seventeenth century, claims the unique honour of being the first directly to revive in modern times the teaching of Plutarch and Porphyry. Other minds, indeed, of a high order, like More and Montaigne, had, as already shown, implicitly condemned the inveterate barbarism. But Gassendi is the writer who first, since the extinction of the Platonic philosophy, expressly and unequivocally attempted to enlighten the world upon this fundamental truth.

He was born of poor parents, near Digne, in Provence. In his earliest years he gave promise of his extraordinary genius. At nineteen he was professor of philosophy at Aix. His celebrated “Essays against the Aristotleians” (Exercitationes Paradoxicæ Adversus Aristoteleos) was his first appearance in the philosophic world. Written some years earlier, it was first published, in part, in the year 1624. It divides with the Novum Organon of Francis Bacon, with which it was almost contemporary, the honour of being the earliest effectual assault upon the old scholastic jargon which, abusing the name and authority of Aristotle, during some three or four centuries of mediæval darkness had kept possession of the schools and universities of Europe. It at once raised up for Gassendi a host of enemies, the supporters of the old orthodoxy, and, as has always been the case in the exposure of falsehood, he was assailed with a torrent of virulent invective. Five of the Books of the Exercitationes, by the advice of his friends, who dreaded the consequences of his courage, had been suppressed. In the Fourth Book, besides the heresy of Kopernik (which Bacon had not the courage or the penetration to adopt), the doctrine of the eternity of the Earth had been maintained, as already taught by Bruno; while the Seventh, according to the table of contents, contained a formal recommendation of the Epicurean theory of morals, in which Pleasure and Virtue are synonymous terms.

In the midst of the obloquy thus aroused the philosopher devoted himself, by way of consolation, to the study of anatomy and astronomy, as well as to literary studies.[Pg 101] “As the result of his anatomical researches he composed a treatise to prove that man was intended to live upon vegetables, and that animal food, as contrary to the human constitution, is baneful and unwholesome.”[117] He was the first to observe the transit of the planet Mercury over the Sun’s disc (1631), previously calculated by Kepler. He next appears publicly as the opponent of Descartes in his Disquisitiones Anticartesianæ (1643)—a work justly distinguished, according to the remark of an eminent German critic, as a model of controversial excellence. The philosophic world was soon divided between the two hostile camps. It is sufficient to observe here that Descartes, whatever merit may attach to him in other respects, by his equally absurd and mischievous paradox that the non-human species are possessed only of unconscious sensation and perception, had done as much as he well could to destroy his reputation for common sense and common reason with all the really thinking part of the world. Yet this “animated machine” theory, incredible as it may appear, has recently been revived by a well-known physiologist of the present day, in the very face of the most ordinary facts and experience—a theory about which it needs only to be said that it deserves to be classed with some of the most absurd and monstrous conceptions of mediævalism. As though, to quote Voltaire’s admirable criticism, God had given to the lower animals reason and feeling to the end that they might not feel and reason. It was not thus, as the same writer reminds us, that Locke and Newton argued.[118]

In 1646 Gassendi became Regius Professor of Mathematics in the University of Paris, where his lecture-room was crowded with listeners of all classes. His Life and Morals of Epikurus (De Vitâ et Moribus Epicuri), his principal work, appeared in the year 1647. It is a triumphant refutation of the prejudices and false representations connected with the name of one of the very greatest and most virtuous of the Greek Masters, which had been prevalent during so many ages. Neither his European reputation, nor the universal respect extorted[Pg 102] by his private as well as public merits, could corrupt the simplicity of Gassendi; and his sober tastes were little in sympathy with the luxurious or literary trifling of Paris:—

Lange, from whom we have quoted this brief notice, proceeds to vindicate his position as a physical philosopher:—

Although of extraordinary erudition his learning did not, as too often happens, obscure the powers of original thought and reason. Bayle, writing at the end of the seventeenth century, has characterised him as “the greatest philosopher amongst scholars, and the greatest scholar amongst philosophers;” and Newton conceived the same high esteem for the great vindicator of Epikurus.[120]

It is in his celebrated letter to his friend Van Helmont, that Gassendi deals with the irrational assertions of certain physiologists, apparently more devoted to the defence of the orthodox diet than to the discovery of unwelcome truth, as to the character of the human teeth:—

[Pg 103]

Helmont, it seems, had rested his principal argument for flesh-eating, not altogether in accordance with Genesis, and certainly not in accordance with Science, on the presumption that man was formed expressly for carnivorousness. To this Gassendi replied that, without ignoring theological argument, he still maintained comparative Anatomy to be a satisfactory and sufficient guide. He then applies himself to refute the physiological prejudice of Helmont about the teeth, &c. (as already quoted), and begins by warning his friend that he is not to wonder if the self-love of men is constantly viewed by him with suspicion.[121]

He repeats Plutarch’s unanswerable challenge:—

He, finally, refutes the popular objection about the strength-giving properties of flesh-meat, and instances Horses, Bulls, and others.[122]

In his Ethics (affixed to his Books on Physics) he quotes and endorses the opinions of Epikurus on the slaughter of innocent life:—

With that Great Master he thus rebukes the fashionable “hospitality”:—

[Pg 105]

THERE is one name which, in reputation, occupies a pre-eminent position in philosophy, belonging to this period—Francis Bacon. But, for ourselves, for whom true ethical and humanitarian principles have a much deeper significance than mere mental force undirected to the highest aims of truth and of justice, the name of the modern assertor of the truths of Vegetarianism will challenge greater reverence than even that of the author of the New Instrument.

That Bacon should exhibit himself in the character of an advocate of the rights of the lower races is hardly to be expected from the selfish and unscrupulous promoter of his own private interests at the expense at once of common gratitude and common feeling. His remarks on Vivisection (where he questions whether experiments on human beings are defensible, and suggests the limitation of scientific torture to the non-human races)[125] are, in fact, sufficient evidence of his indifferentism to so unselfish an object as the advocacy of the claims of our defenceless dependants. When we consider his unusual sagacity in exposing the absurd quasi-scientific methods of his predecessors, and of the prevailing (so-called) philosophical system and the many profound remarks to be found in his writings, it must be added that we are reluctantly compelled to believe that the opinions elsewhere which he publishes inconsistent with those principles were inspired by that notorious servility and courtiership by which he flattered the absurd and pedantic dogmatism of one of the most contemptible of kings.

One passage there is, however, in his writings which seems to give us hope that this eminent compromiser was not altogether insensible to higher and better feeling:—

[Pg 106]

If Bacon had lived longer (he died in 1626) we may entertain the hope that the powerful arguments of his illustrious contemporary might have inspired him with more sound and satisfactory ideas on Dietetics than the somewhat crude ones which he published in his De Augmentis (iv., 2). As for Medicine, he had, reasonably enough, not conceived a high opinion of the methods of its ordinary professors. He says:—

JOHN RAY, the founder of Botanical and, only in little less degree, of Zoological Science, was an alumnus of the University of Cambridge. He was elected Fellow of Trinity College in 1649, and Lecturer in Greek in the following year. While at Cambridge he formed a collection of plants growing in the neighbourhood, a catalogue of which he published in 1660. Three years later, with his friend Francis Willoughby, he travelled over a large part of Europe, as during his academical life he had traversed the greater part of these islands, in pursuit of botanical and zoological science—an account of which tour he published in 1673.

He had been one of the first Fellows of the recently founded Royal Society. In 1682 appeared his New Method of Plants, which formed a new era in botany, or rather, which was the first attempt at making it a real science. It is the basis of the subsequent classification of Jussieu, which is still received; and its author was the first to propose the division of plants into monocotyledons and dicotyledons.

His principal work is the Historia Plantarum, 1686–1704.[Pg 107] “In it he collected and arranged all the species of plants which had been described by botanists. He enumerated 18,625 species. Haller, Sprengel, Adamson, and others speak of this work as being the produce of immense labour, and as containing much acute criticism.”

What, however, is more interesting to us is the fact that “in zoology Ray ranks almost as high as in botany, and his works on this subject are even more important, as they still, in great measure, preserve their utility. Cuvier says that ‘they may be considered as the foundation of modern zoology, for naturalists are obliged to consult them every instant for the purpose of clearing up the difficulties which they meet with in the works of Linnæus and his copyists.’”

Between 1676–1686 appeared Ornithologia and Historia Piscium, the materials of which had been left him by his friend Willoughby. To his extraordinary erudition and industry the world was indebted for A Methodical Synopsis of Quadrupeds as well as a very valuable history of Insects. Conspicuous amongst his merits are his accuracy of observation and his philosophical method of classification. With others, Buffon is largely indebted to the most meritorious of the pioneers of zoological knowledge.

Ray has delivered his profession of faith in the superiority and excellence of the non-flesh diet in the following eloquent passage which has been quoted with approval by his friend John Evelyn:—

JOHN EVELYN, the representative of the more estimable part of the higher middle life of his time, who has so eloquently set forth the praises of the vegetable diet, also claims with Ray the honour of having first excited, amongst the opulent classes of his countrymen, a rational taste for botanical knowledge. Especially meritorious and truly patriotic was his appeal to the owners of land, by growing trees to provide the country with useful as well as ornamental timber for the benefit of posterity. He was one of the first to treat gardening and planting in a scientific manner; and his own cultivation of exotic and other valuable plants was a most useful example too tardily followed by ignorant or selfish land[Pg 108]lords of those and succeeding times. It would have been well indeed for the mass of the people of these islands, had the owners of landed property cared to develope the teaching of Evelyn by stocking the country with various fruit trees, and so supplied at once an easy and wholesome food. O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona nôrint, Agricolas!... Fundit humo facilem victum justissima Tellus.[128]

The family of Evelyn was settled at Wooton, in Surrey. During the struggle between the Parliament and the Court he went abroad, and travelled for some years in France and in Italy, where he seems to have employed his leisure in a more refined and useful way than is the wont of most of his travelling countrymen. He returned home in 1651. At the foundation of the Royal Society, some ten years later, Evelyn became one of its earliest Fellows. His first work was published in 1664, Sylva; or, a Discourse of Forest Trees and the Propagation of Timber. Its immediate cause was the application of the Naval Commissioners to the Royal Society for advice in view of the growing scarcity of timber, especially of oak, in England. A large quantity of the more valuable wood now existing is the practical outcome of his timely publication.

In 1675, appeared his Terra: a Discourse of the Earth Relating to the Culture and the Improvement of it, to Vegetation and the Propagation of Plants. The book by which he is most popularly known is his Diary and Correspondence, one of the most interesting productions of the kind. Besides its value as giving an insight into the manner of life in the fashionable society of the greater part of the seventeenth century, it is of importance as an independent chronicle of the public events of the day. The work which has the most interest and value for us is his Acetaria (Salads, or Herbs eaten with vinegar), in which the author professes his faith in the truth and excellence of the Vegetarian diet. Unfortunately, according to the usual perversity of literary enterprise, it is one of those few books which, representing some profounder truth, are nevertheless the most neglected by those who undertake to supply the mental and moral needs of the reading public.

Evelyn held many high posts under the varying Governments of the day; and being, by tradition and connexion, attached to the monarchical party, he attracted (contrary to the general experience) the grateful recognition of the restored dynasty.

[Pg 109]

Having adduced other arguments for abstinence from flesh, Evelyn continues:—

Cardan—the pseudo-savant of the sixteenth century—had written, it seems, in favour of flesh-meat. Evelyn informs us that:—

He appeals to the biblical reverence of his readers, and tells them:—

[Pg 110]

He then quotes the profession of faith of the father of English botany and zoology; and goes on eloquently to expatiate on the varied pleasures of a non-flesh and fruit diet:—

Evelyn produces an imposing array of the “Old Fathers”:—

He is “persuaded that more blood has been shed between Christians” through addiction to the sanguinary food than by any other cause:—

IT is opportune here to refer to the sentiments of Evelyn’s contemporary and political and ecclesiastical opposite—the great Puritan poet and patriot—one of the very greatest names in all literature. Milton’s feeling, so far as he had occasion to express it, is quite in unison with the principles of dietetic reform, and in sympathy with aspirations after the more spiritual life.

In one of his earliest writings, on the eve of the production of one of the finest poems of its kind in the English language—the Ode to Chris[Pg 111]t’s Nativity, composed at the age of twenty-one—he thus writes in Latin verse to his friend Charles Deodati, recommending the purer diet at all events to those who aspired to the nobler creations of poetry:—

To readers of his master-piece the Paradise Lost, it is perhaps a work of supererogation to point out the charming passages in which he sympathetically describes the food of the Age of Innocence:—

In Raphael’s discourse with his terrestrial entertainers, the ethereal messenger utters a prophecy (as we may take it) of the future general adoption by our race of “fruit, man’s nourishment,” and we may interpret his intimation:—

as a picture of the true earthly paradise to be—“the Paradise of Peace.”

With these exquisite pictures of the life of bloodless feasts and ambrosial food we may compare the fearful picture of the Court of Death, displayed in prospective vision before the terror-stricken gaze of the traditional progenitor of our species, where, amongst the occupants, the largest number are the victims of “intemperance in meats and drinks, which on the earth shall bring diseases dire.” In this universal lazar-house might be seen—

Very different, in other respects, from those of the author of the History of the Reformation in England the sentiments of his celebrated contemporary Bossuet, whose eloquence gained for him the distinguishing title of the “Eagle of Méaux,” as to the degrading character of the prevalent human nourishment in the Western world, are sufficiently remarkable to deserve some notice. The Oraisons Funêbres and, particularly, his Discours sur L’Histoire Universelle have entitled him to a high rank in French literature. But a single passage in the last work, we shall readily admit, does more credit to his heart than his most eloquent efforts in oratory or literature do to his intellect. That, in common with other theologians, Catholic and Protestant, he has thought it necessary to assume the intervention of the Deity to sanction the sustenance of human life by the destruction of other innocent life, does not affect the weight of intrinsic evidence derivable from the natural feeling as to the debasing influence of the Slaughter-House. It is thus that he, impliedly at least, condemns the barbarous practice:—

Bossuet, a few pages later, arrives at the necessary and natural consequence of the murder of other animals, when he records that “the brutalised human race could no longer rise to the true contemplation of intellectual things.”[134]

THE most paradoxical of moralists, born at Dort, in Holland. He was brought up to the profession of medicine, and took the degree of M.D. He afterwards settled and practised in London.

It was in 1714 that he published his short poem called The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turned Honest, to which he afterwards added long explanatory notes, and then republished the whole under the new and celebrated title of The Fable of the Bees. This work “which, however erroneous may be its views of morals and of society, is written in a proper style, and bears all the marks of an honest and sincere inquiry on an important subject, exposed its author to much obloquy, and met with answers and attacks.... It would appear that some of the hostility against this work, and against Mandeville generally, is to be traced to another publication, recommending the public licensing of ‘stews,’ the matter and manner of which are certainly exceptionable, though, at the same time, it must be stated that Mandeville earnestly and with seeming sincerity commends his plan as a means of diminishing immorality, and that he endeavoured, so far as lay in his power, by affixing a high price and in other ways, to prevent the work from having a general circulation.” In fact, Mandeville is one of those injudicious but well-meaning reformers who, by their propensity to perverse paradox, have injured at once their reputation and their usefulness for after times.

A second part of The Fable appeared at a later period. Amongst other numerous writings were two entitled, Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness, and An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War. He appears to have been enabled to pursue his literary career in great measure by the liberality of his Dutch friends, and he was a constant guest of the first Earl of Macclesfield. “The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices Public Benefits may be received in two ways,” says the writer in the Penny Cyclopædia, whom we have already quoted,[Pg 114] “as a satire on men, and as a theory of society and national prosperity. So far as it is a satire, it is sufficiently just and pleasant, but received in its more ambitious character of a theory of society, it is altogether worthless. It is Mandeville’s object to show that national greatness depends on the prevalence of fraud and luxury; and for this purpose he supposes ‘a vast hive of bees’ possessing in all respects institutions similar to those of men; he details the various frauds, similar to those among men, practised by bees one upon another in various professions.... His hive of bees having thus become wealthy and great, he afterwards supposes a mutual jealousy of frauds to arise, and Fraud to be, by common consent, dismissed; and he again assumes that wealth and luxury immediately disappear, and that the greatness of the society is gone.” For our part, in place of “greatness,” we should have rather written misery, as far as concerns the mass of communities.

Strange, as it may appear, that views of this kind should be seriously put forth, “it is yet more so that they should come from one whose object always was, however strange the way in which he set about it, to promote good morals, for there is nothing in Mandeville’s writings to warrant the belief that he sought to encourage vice.”[135]

Mandeville, like Swift, in the piece entitled An Argument against Abolishing Christianity; or like De Foe, in his Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which were taken au sérieux almost universally at the time of their appearance, may have used the style of grave irony, so far as the larger portion of his Fable is concerned, for the purpose of making a stronger impression on the public conscience. If such were his purpose, the irony is so profound that it has missed its aim. Yet that his purpose was true and earnest is sufficiently evident in his opinion of the practice of slaughtering for food:—

THE intimate friend of Pope and Swift is best known by his charming and instructive Fables. He was born at Barnstaple, in Devonshire, and belonged to the old family of the Le Gays of that county. His father, reduced in means, apprenticed him to a silk mercer in the Strand, London, in whose employment he did not long remain. The first of his poems, Rural Sports, appeared in 1711. In the following year he became secretary to the Duchess of Monmouth, and he served for a short time as secretary to the English embassy in Hanover. His next work was his Shepherd’s Week, in Six Pastorals, in which he ridicules the sentimentality of the “pastorals” of his own and preceding age. It contains much naturalness as well as humour, and it was the precursor of Crabbe’s rural sketches. In 1726 he published the most successful of his works, the Beggars’ Opera—the idea of which had been suggested to him by[Pg 116] the Dean of St. Patrick’s. It was received with unbounded applause, and it originated the (so-called) English opera, which for a time supplanted the Italian.

The Fables first appeared in 1726. They were supplemented afterwards by others, and the volume was dedicated to the young Duke of Cumberland, famous in after years by his suppression of the Highland rising of 1745. Gay’s death, which happened suddenly, called forth the sincere laments of his devoted friends Swift and Pope. The former, in his letters, frequently refers to his loss with deep feeling; and Pope has characterised him as—

Of his Fables—the best in the language—one of the most interesting is the well-known Hare and Many Friends, in which he seems to record some of his own experiences. The Court of Death, suggested probably by Milton’s fine passage in the Paradise Lost, is one of his most forcible. When the principal Diseases have severally advanced their claims to pre-eminence, Death calls upon Intemperance:—

It is in the following fable that Gay especially satirises the sanguinary diet:—

[Pg 118]

This is not the only apologue in which the rhyming moralist exposes at once the inconsistency and the injustice of the human animal who, himself choosing to live by slaughter, yet hypocritically stigmatises with the epithets “cruel” and “bloodthirsty” those animals whom Nature has evidently designed to be predaceous. In The Shepherd’s Dog and the Wolf he represents the former upbraiding the ravisher of the sheepfolds for attacking “a weak, defenceless kind”:—

In The Philosopher and the Pheasants the same truth is conveyed with equal force:—

In another parable Gay, in some sort, gives the victims of the Shambles their revenge:—

ONE of the most esteemed of English physicians, and one of the first medical authorities in this country who expressly wrote in advocacy of the reformed diet, descended from an old Scottish family. He studied medicine at Edinburgh—then and still a principal school of medicine and surgery—where he was a pupil of Dr. Pitcairn. At about the age of thirty he removed to London, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and took his M.D. degree, commencing practice in the metropolis.

The manner of life of a medical practitioner in the first half of the last century differed considerably from the present fashion. Not only personal inclination, but even professional interest, usually led him to frequent taverns and to indulge in all the excesses of “good living;” for in such boon companionship he most easily laid the foundation of his practice. Cheyne’s early habits of temperance thus gave way to the double temptation, and soon by this indulgence he contracted painful disorders which threatened his life. An enormous weight of flesh, intermittent fevers, shortness of breath, and lethargy combined to enfeeble and depress him.

His first appearance in literature was the publication of his New Theory of Fevers, written in defence and at the suggestion of his old master Dr. Pitcairn, who was at war with his brethren on the nature of epidemics. The author, while in after life holding that it contained, though in a crude form, some valuable matter, wisely allowed it to fall into oblivion. The Mechanical or Iatro-Mathematical Theory, as it was called, of which Cheyne was one of the earliest and most distinguished expounders, by which it was attempted to apply the laws of Mechanics to vital phenomena, had succeeded to the principles of the old Chemical School. On the Continent the new theory had the support of the eminent authority of Boerhaave, Borelli, Sauvages, Hoffman, and others. The natural desire to discover some definite and simple formulæ of medical science lay at the root of this, as of many other hypotheses. Cheyne, himself, it is right to observe, ridiculed the notion that all vital processes can be explained on mechanical principles.

In 1705 he published his Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion, a book which had some repute in its day, apparently, since it was in use in the Universities. Between this and his next essay in literature a long interval elapsed, during which he had to pay the penalty of his old[Pg 121] habits in apoplectic giddiness, violent headaches, and depression of spirits. Happily, it became for him the turning-point in his life, and eventually rendered him so useful an instructor of his kind. He had now arrived at a considerable amount of reputation in the profession. He seems to have been naturally of agreeable manners and of an amiable disposition, as well as of lively wit which, improved by study and reading, made him highly popular; and amongst his scientific and professional friends he was in great esteem. He had now, however—not too soon—determined to abandon his bon-vivantism, and speedily “even those who had shared the best part of my profusions,” he tells us, “who, in their necessities had been relieved by my false generosity, and, in their disorders, been relieved by my care, did now entirely relinquish and abandon me.” He retired into solitude in the country and, almost momentarily expecting the termination of his life, set himself to serious and earnest reflection on the follies and vices of ordinary living.

At this time it seems that, although he had reduced his food to the smallest possible amount, he had not altogether relinquished flesh-meat. He repaired to Bath for the waters and, by living in the most temperate way and by constant and regular exercise, he seemed to have regained his early health. At Bath he devoted himself to cases of nervous diseases which most nearly concerned his own state, and which were most abundant at that fashionable resort. About the year 1712, or in the forty-second year of his age, his health was fairly re-established, and he began to relax in the milk and vegetable regimen which he had previously adopted.

His next publication was An Essay on the Gout and Bath Waters (1720), which passed through seven editions in six years. In it he commends the vegetable diet, although not so radically as in his latest writings. His relaxation of dietetic reform quickly brought back his former maladies, and he again suffered severely. During the next ten or twelve years he continued to increase in corpulency, until he at last reached the enormous weight of thirty-two stones, and he describes his condition at this time as intolerable.[140] In 1725 he left Bath for London, to consult his friend Dr. Arbuthnot, whose advice probably renewed and confirmed his old inclination for the rational mode of living. At all events, within two years, by a strict adherence to the milk and vegetable regimen his maladies finally disappeared; nor did he afterwards suffer by any relapse into dietetic errors.

In the preceding year had appeared his first important and original[Pg 122] work—his well-known Essay of Health and a Long Life. In the preface he declares that it is published for the benefit of those weakly persons who

It is generally acknowledged to be one of the best books on the subject. Haller pronounced it to be “the best of all the works bearing upon the health of sedentary persons and invalids.” It went through several editions in the space of two years, and in 1726 was enlarged by the author and translated by his friend and pupil John Robertson M.A. into Latin, and three or four editions were quickly exhausted in France and Germany. In this book, while reducing flesh-meat to a minimum, and insisting upon the necessity of abstinence from grosser food and of the use of vegetables only, at the morning and evening meals, he had not advanced as yet so far as to preach the truth in its entirety. He arrived at it only by slow and gradual conviction. Expatiating on the follies and miseries of bon-vivantism, he proceeds to affirm that—

While the Essay of Health added greatly to his reputation with all thinking people, it also exposed him (as was to be expected) to a storm of small wit, ridicule, and misrepresentation:—

His next publication was his English Malady: or, a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all kinds, which was also well received, going[Pg 123] through four editions in two years. The incessant ridicule with which the gourmands had assailed his last work seems to have made him cautious in his next attempt to revolutionise dietetics; and he is careful to advertise the public that his milk and vegetable system was for those in weak health only. Denouncing the use of sauces and provocatives of unnatural appetite, “contrived not only to rouse a sickly stomach to receive the unnatural load, but to render a naturally good one incapable of knowing when it has enough,” he asks, “Is it any wonder then that the diseases which proceed from idleness and fulness of meat should increase in proportion?” He is bold enough by this time to affirm that, for the cure of many diseases, an entire abstinence from flesh is indisputably necessary:—

Six years later, in 1740, appeared his Essay on Regimen: together with Five Discourses Medical Moral and Philosophical, &c. Since his last exhortation to the world Cheyne had evidently convinced himself, by long experience as well as reflection, of the great superiority of the vegetable diet for all—sound as well as sick; and, accordingly, he speaks in strong and clear language of the importance of a general reform. As a consequence of this plain speaking, his new book met with a comparatively cold reception. Perhaps, too, its mathematical and somewhat abstruse tone may have affected its popularity. As regards its moral tone it was a new revelation, doubtless, for the vast majority of his readers. He boldly asserts:—

[Pg 124]

Noble and courageous words! Courageous as coming from an eminent member of a profession—which almost rivals the legal or even the clerical, in opposition to all change in the established order of things. In Dr. Cheyne’s days such interested or bigoted opposition was even stronger than in the present time. From the period of the final establishment of his health, about 1728, little is known of his life excepting through his writings. Almost all we know is, that he continued some fifteen years to practise in London and in Bath with distinguished reputation and success. He had married a daughter of Dr. Middleton of Bristol by whom he had several children. His only son was born in 1712. Amongst his intimate friends was the celebrated Dr. Arbuthnot, a Scotchman like himself, and we find him meeting Sir Hans Sloane and Dr. Mead at the bedside of his friend and relative Bishop Burnet. Both Dr. Arbuthnot and Sir Hans Sloane, we may remark in passing, have given evidence in favour of the purer living. His own diet he thus describes in his Author’s Case, written towards the end of his life:—

As for the effect of this regimen, he tells us that “since that time [his last lapse] I thank God I have gone on in one constant tenor of diet, and enjoy as good health as, at my time of life (being now sixty), I or any man can reasonably expect.” When we remember the complicity of maladies of which he had been the victim during his adhesion to the orthodox mode of living, such experience is sufficiently significant. Some ten years later he records his experiences as follows:—

[Pg 125]

The last production of Dr. Cheyne was his “Natural Method of Curing the Diseases of the Body, and the Disorders of the Mind Depending on the Body. In three parts. Part I.—General Reflections on the Economy of Nature in Animal Life. Part II.—The Means and Methods for Preserving Life and Faculties; and also Concerning the Nature and Cure of Acute, Contagious, and Cephalic Disorders. Part III.—Reflections on the Nature and Cure of Particular Chronic Distempers. 8vo. Strahan, London, 1742.” It is dedicated to the celebrated Lord Chesterfield, who records his grateful recognition of the benefits he had experienced from his methods. He writes: “I read with great pleasure your book, which your bookseller sent me according to your direction. The physical part is extremely good, and the metaphysical part may be so too, for what I know, and I believe it is, for as I look upon all metaphysics to be guess work of imagination, I know no imagination likelier to hit upon the right than yours, and I will take your guess against any other metaphysician’s whatsoever. That part which is founded upon knowledge and experience I look upon as a work of public utility, and for which the present age and their posterity may be obliged to you, if they will be pleased to follow it.” Lord Chesterfield, it will be seen below, was one of those more refined minds whose better conscience revolted from, even if they had not the courage or self-control to renounce, the Slaughter House.

The Natural Method its author considers as a kind of supplement to his last book, containing “the practical inferences, and the conclusions drawn from [its principles], in particular cases and diseases, confirmed by forty years’ experience and observation.” It is the most practical of all his works, and is full of valuable observations. Very just and useful is his rebuke of that sort of John-Bullism which affects to hold “good living” not only as harmless but even as a sort of merit—

[Pg 126]

Denouncing the general practice of the Profession of encouraging their patients in indulging vitiated habits and tastes, he reminds them:—

Not the least useful and instructive portions of his treatise are his references to the proper regimen for mental diseases and disordered brains, which, he reasonably infers, are best treated by the adoption of a light and pure dietary. He despairs, however, of the general recognition, or at least adoption, of so rational a method by the “faculty” or the public at large,

[Pg 127]

In regard to all nervous and brain diseases, he insists that the reformed diet would

This benevolent and beneficent dietetic reformer, according to the testimony of an eye-witness, exemplified by his death the value of his principles—relinquishing his last breath easily and tranquilly, while his senses remained entire to the end. During his last illness he was attended by the famous David Hartley, noticed below. He was buried at Weston, near Bath. His character is sufficiently seen in his writings which, if they contain some metaphysical or other ideas which our reason cannot always endorse, in their practical teaching prove him to have been actuated by a true and earnest desire for the best interests of his fellow-men. One of the merits of Cheyne’s writings is his discarding the common orthodox esoteric style of his profession, who seem jealously to exclude all but the “initiated” from their sacred mysteries. One of his biographers has remarked upon this point that “there is another peculiarity about most of Dr. Cheyne’s writings which is worthy of notice. Although there are many passages that are quite unintelligible to the reader unless he possesses a considerable knowledge, not only of medicine but also of mathematics, yet there is no doubt but that the greater part of his works were intended for popular perusal, and in this undertaking he is one of the few medical writers who have been completely successful. His productions, which were much read and had an extensive influence in their day, procured him a considerable degree of reputation, not only with the public, but also with the members of his own profession. If they present to the reader no great discoveries (?) they possess the merit of putting more prominently forward some useful but neglected truths; and though now, probably, but little read, they contain much matter that is well worth studying, and have obtained for their author a respectable place in the history of medical literature.”[143]

Our notice of the author of the Essay on Regimen, &c., would scarcely be[Pg 128] complete without some reference to his friendship with two distinguished characters—John Wesley and Samuel Richardson,[144] the author of Pamela. It was to Dr. Cheyne that Wesley, as he tells us in his journals, was indebted for his conversion to those dietetic principles to which he attributes, in great measure, the invigoration of his naturally feeble constitution, and which enabled him to undergo an amount of fatigue and toil, both mentally and bodily, seldom or never surpassed. Of Cheyne’s friendship for Richardson there are several memorials preserved in his familiar letters to that popular writer; and his free and naïve criticisms of his novels are not a little amusing. The novelist, it seems, was one of his patients, and that he was not always a satisfactory one, under the abstemious regimen, appears occasionally from the remonstrances of his adviser.

THE most epigrammatic, and one of the most elegant, of poets. He was also one of the most precocious. His first production of importance was his Essay on Criticism, written at the age of twenty-one, although not published until two years later. But he had composed, we are assured, several verses of an Epic at the age of twelve; and his Pastorals was given to the world by a youth of sixteen. Its division into the Four Seasons is said to have suggested to Thomson the title of his great poem. The MS. passed through the hands of some distinguished persons, who loudly proclaimed the merits of the boy-poet.

In the same year with his fine mock-heroic Rape of the Lock (1712) appeared The Messiah, in imitation of Isaiah and of Virgil (in his well-known Eclogue IV.), both of whom celebrate, in similar strains, the advent of a “golden age” to be. The “Sybilline” prophecy, which Pope supposes the Latin poet to have read, existed, it need scarcely be added, only in the imagination of himself and of the authorities on whom he relied. Windsor Forest (1713) deserves special notice as one of the earliest of that class of poems which derive their inspiration directly from Nature. It was the precursor of The Seasons, although the anti-barbarous feeling is less pronounced in the former. We find, however, the germs of that higher feeling which appears more developed in[Pg 129] the Essay on Man; and the following verses, descriptive of the usual “sporting” scenes, are significant:—

His Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard (a romantic version of a very realistic story), Temple of Fame, Imitations of Chaucer, translation of the Iliad (1713–1720)—characterised by Gibbon as having “every merit but that of likeness to its original”—an edition of Shakspere, The Dunciad (1728), translation of the Odyssey, are some of the works which attest his genius and industry. But it is with his Moral Essays—and in particular the Essay on Man (1732–1735), the most important of his productions—that we are especially concerned.

As is pretty well known, these Essays owe their conception, in great part, to his intimate friend St. John Bolingbroke. Although the author by birth and, perhaps, still more from a feeling of pride which might make him reluctant to abandon an unfashionable sect (such it was at that time), belonged nominally to the Old Church, the theology and metaphysics of the work display little of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. The pervading principles of the Essay on Man are natural theology or, as Warburton styles it, “Naturalism” (i.e., the putting aside human assertion for the study of the attributes of Deity through its visible manifestations) and Optimism.[145]

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The merits of the Essay, it must be added, consist not so much in the philosophy of the poem as a whole as in the many fine and true thoughts scattered throughout it, which the author’s epigrammatic terseness indelibly fixes in the mind. Of the whole poem the most valuable part, undoubtedly, is its ridicule of the common arrogant (pretended) belief that all other species on the earth have been brought into being for the benefit of the human race—an egregious fallacy, by the way, which, ably exposed as it has been over and over again, still frequently reappears in our popular theology and morals. To the writers and talkers of this too numerous class may be commended the rebukes of Pope:—

He then paints the picture of the “Times of Innocence” of the Past, or rather (as we must take it) of the Future:—

Again, depicting the growth of despotism and superstition, and speculating as to—

he traces the gradual horrors of sacrifice beginning with other, and culminating in that of the human, species:—

Whenever occasion arises, Pope fails not to stigmatise the barbarity of slaughtering for food; and the sæva indignatio urges him to upbraid his fellows with the slaughter of—

And, again, he expresses his detestation of the selfishness of our species who—

That all this was no mere affectation of feeling appears from his correspondence and contributions to the periodicals of the time:—

[Pg 132]

Consistently with the expression of this true philosophy, he declares elsewhere that—

The personal character of Pope, we may add, has of late been subjected to minute and searching criticism. Some meannesses, springing from an extreme anxiety for fame with after ages, have undoubtedly tarnished his reputation for candour. His excessive animosity towards his public or private enemies may be palliated in part, if not excused, by his well-known feebleness of health and consequent mental irritability. For the rest, he was capable of the most sincere and disinterested attachments; and not his least merit, in literature, is that in an age of servile authorship he cultivated literature not for place or pay, but for its own sake.

Amongst Pope’s intimate friends were Dr. Arbuthnot, Dean Swift, and Gay. The first of these, best known as the joint author with Pope and Swift of Martinus Scriblerus, a satire on the useless pedantry prevalent in education and letters, and especially as the author of the History of John Bull (the original of that immortal personification of beef, beer, and prejudice), published his Essay Concerning Aliments, in which the vegetable diet is commended as a preventive or cure of certain diseases, about the year 1730. Not the least meritorious of his works was an epitaph on the notorious Colonel Chartres—one of[Pg 133] the few epitaphs which are attentive less to custom than to truth, and, we may add, in marked contrast with that typical one on his unhistorical contemporary Captain Blifil.

In the Travels of Lemuel Gulliver the reader will find the sæva indignatio of Swift—or, at all events, of the Houyhnhnms—amongst other things, launched against the indiscriminating diet of his countrymen:—

Among the infinite variety of remedies and prescriptions, in the human Materia Medica, the astounded Houyhnhnm learns, are reckoned “serpents, toads, frogs, spiders, dead men’s flesh and bones, birds, beasts, fishes”—no mere travellers’ tales (it is perhaps necessary to explain), but sober fact, as any one may discover for himself by an examination of some of the received and popular medical treatises of the seventeenth century, in which the most absurd “prescriptions,” involving the most frightful cruelty, are recorded with all seriousness:—

Although unaccustomed to the better living, and finding it “insipid at first,” the human slave of the Houyhnhnm (a word which, by the way, in that language, means “the perfection of nature”) records as the result of his experience, in the first place, how little will sustain human life; and, in the second place, the fact of the superior healthfulness of the vegetable food.[148]

About this period or a little earlier, Philippe Hecquet, a French physician, published his Traité des Dispenses du Carême (“Treatise on Dispensations in Lent”), 1709, in which he gave in his adhesion to the principles of Vegetarianism—at all events, so far as health is concerned. He is mentioned by Voltaire, and is supposed to be the original of the doctor Sangrado of Le Sage.[149] If this conjecture have[Pg 134] any truth, the author of Gil Blas is open to the grave charge of misrepresentation, of sacrificing truth to effect, or (what is still worse and still more common) of pandering to popular prejudices.[150]

IN the long and terrible series of the Ages the distinguishing glory of the eighteenth century is its Humanitarianism—not visible, indeed, in legislation or in the teaching of the ordinarily-accredited guides of the public faith and morals, but proclaimed, nevertheless, by the great prophets of that era. As far as ordinary life was concerned, the last age is only too obnoxious to the charge of selfishness and heartlessness. Callousness to suffering, as regards the non-human species in particular, is sufficiently apparent in the common amusements and “pastimes” of the various grades of the community.

Yet, if we compare the tone of even the common-place class of writers with that of the authors of quasi-scientific treatises of the preceding century—in which the most cold-blooded atrocities on the helpless victims of human ignorance and barbarity are prescribed for the composition of their medical nostrums, &c., with the most unconscious audacity and ignoring of every sort of feeling—considerable advance is apparent in the slow onward march of the human race towards the goal of a true morality and religion.

To the author of The Seasons belongs the everlasting honour of being the first amongst modern poets earnestly to denounce the manifold wrongs inflicted upon the subject species, and, in particular, the savagery inseparable from the Slaughter-House—for Pope did not publish his Essay on Man until four years after the appearance of Spring.

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James Thomson, of Scottish parentage, came to London to seek his fortune in literature, at the age of 25. For some time he experienced the poverty and troubles which so generally have been the lot of young aspirants to literary, especially poetic, fame. Winter—which inaugurated a new school of poetry—appeared in March, 1726. That the publisher considered himself liberal in offering three guineas for the poem speaks little for the taste of the time; but that a better taste was coming into existence is also plain from the fact of its favourable reception, notwithstanding the obscurity of the author. Three editions appeared in the same year. Summer, his next venture, was published in 1727, and the (Four) Seasons in 1730, by subscription—387 subscribers enrolling their names for copies at a guinea each.

Natural enthusiasm, sympathy, and love for all that is really beautiful on Earth (a sort of feeling not to be appreciated by vulgar minds) forms his chief characteristic. But, above all, his sympathy with suffering in all its forms (see, particularly, his reflections after the description of the snowstorm in Winter), not limited by the narrow bounds of nationality or of species but extended to all innocent life—his indignation against oppression and injustice, are what most honourably distinguish him from almost all of his predecessors and, indeed, from most of his successors. The Seasons is the forerunner of The Task and the humanitarian school of poetry. The Castle of Indolence in the stanza of Spenser, has claims of a kind different from those of The Seasons; and the admirers of The Faerie Queen cannot fail to appreciate the merits of the modern romance. Besides these chefs-d’œuvre Thomson wrote two tragedies, Sophonisba and Liberty, the former of which, at the time, had considerable success upon the stage. In the number of his friends he reckoned Pope and Samuel Johnson, both of whom are said to have had some share in the frequent revisions which he made of his principal production.

It is with his Spring that we are chiefly concerned, since it is in that division of his great poem that he eloquently contrasts the two very opposite diets. Singing the glories of the annual birth-time and general resurrection of Nature, he first celebrates

And then goes on to picture the feast of blood:—

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And again in denouncing the amateur slaughtering (euphemised by the mocking term of Sport) unblushingly perpetrated in the broad light of day:—

We conclude these extracts from The Seasons with the poet’s indignant reflection upon the selfish greed of Commerce, which barbarously sacrifices by thousands (as it does also the innocent mammalia of the seas) the noblest and most sagacious of the terrestrial races for the sake of a superfluous luxury:—

CELEBRATED as the earliest writer of the utilitarian school of morals. At the age of fifteen he entered Jesus College, Cambridge, of which he was afterwards elected a Fellow. Scruples of conscience about the “Thirty-nine Articles” would not allow him to subscribe them and take orders, and he turned to the medical profession, in which he reached considerable eminence.

His Observations on Man: his Frame, his Duties, and his Expectations, appeared in 1748. The principal interest in the book consists in the fact of its containing the germs of that school of moral philosophy of which Paley, Bentham, and Mill have been the most able expositors. He had imbibed the teaching of Locke upon the origin of ideas, which that first of English metaphysicians founded in Sensation and Reflection or Association, in contradiction to the old theory of Innateness. Although now universally received, it is hardly necessary to remark that at its first promulgation it met with as great opposition as all rational ideas experience long after their first introduction; and Locke’s controversy with the Bishop of Worcester is matter of history.

It has already been stated that David Hartley was the friend of Dr. Cheyne, whom he attended in his last illness, and he numbered amongst his acquaintances some of the most eminent personages of the day. His character appears to have been singularly amiable and disinterested. His theology is, for the most part, of unsuspected orthodoxy. The following sentences reveal the bias of his mind in the matter of kreophagy:—

Dr. Hartley is not the only theologian who has suggested the possibility or probability of a future life for all or some of the non-human races. This question we must leave to the theologians. All that we here remark is, that Hartley is one of the very few amongst his brethren who have had the consistency and the courage of their opinions to deduce the inevitable inference.

NOTWITHSTANDING his strange self-deception as to the “general order of nature,” by which he attempted (sincerely we presume) to silence the better promptings of conscience, the remarkably strong feeling expressed by Lord Chesterfield gives him some right to notice here. His early instinctive aversion for the food which is the product of torture and murder is much better founded, we shall be apt to believe, than the fallacious sophism by which he seems eventually to have succeeded in stifling the voices of Nature and Reason in seeking refuge under the shelter of a superficial philosophy. At all events his example is a forcible illustration of Seneca’s observation that the better feelings of the young need only to be evoked by a proper education to conduct them to a true morality and religion.[155]

As it is we have to lament that he had not the greater light (of[Pg 140] science) of the present time, if, indeed, the “deceitfulness of riches” would not have been for him, as for the mass of the rich or fashionable world, the shipwreck of just and rational feeling.

Philip Dormer, Earl of Chesterfield, succeeded to the family title in 1726. High in favour with the new king—George II.—he received the appointment of Ambassador-extraordinary to the Court of Holland in 1728, and amongst other honours that of the knighthood of the Garter. In 1745 he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, in which post, during his brief rule, he seemed to have governed with more success than some of his predecessors or successors. He was soon afterwards a Secretary of State: ill-health obliged him to relinquish this office after a short tenure. He wrote papers for The World—the popular periodical of the time—besides some poetical pieces, but he is chiefly known as an author by his celebrated Letters to his Son, which long served as the text-book of polite society. It contains some remarks in regard to the relations of the sexes scarcely consonant with the custom, or at least with the outward code of sexual morals of the present day. His sentiments upon the subject in question are as follow:—

The writer might have instanced still more frightful results of this insensibility on the part of the influential classes of the community: nor indeed, the better few always excepted, were he living now could he present a much more favourable picture of the morals (in this the most important department of them) of the ruling sections of society.

Ritson supplements the virtual adhesion of Lord Chesterfield to the principles of Humanity, with some remarks of Sir W. Jones, the eminent Orientalist, who (protesting against the selfish callousness of “Sportsmen” and even of “Naturalists” in the infliction of pain) writes: “I shall never forget the couplet of Ferdusi[159] for which Sadi,[160] who cites it with applause, pours blessings on his departed spirit:—

To which creditable expression of feeling we would append a word of astonishment at that very common inconsistency, and failure in elementary logic, which permits men—while easily and hyperbolically commiserating the fate of an emmet, a beetle, or a worm—to ignore the necessarily infinitely greater sufferings of the highly-organised victims of the Table.”

OF the life and literary productions of the most remarkable name in the whole history of literature—if at least we regard the extent and variety of his astonishing genius, as well as the immense influence, contemporary and future, of his writings—only a brief outline can be given here. Yet, as the most eminent humanitarian prophet of the eighteenth century, the principal facts of his life deserve somewhat larger notice than within the general scope of this work.

François Marie Arouet—commonly known by his assumed name of Voltaire—on his mother’s side of a family of position recently ennobled, was born at Chatenay, near Paris. He was educated at the Jesuits’ College of Louis XIV., where, it is said, the fathers already foretold his[Pg 142] future eminence. Like many other illustrious writers he was originally destined for the “Law,” which was little adapted to his genius, and, like his great prototype, Lucian, and others, he soon abandoned all thought of that profession for letters and philosophy. He had the good fortune, at an early age, to gain the favour of the celebrated Ninon de Lenclos, who left him a legacy of 2,000 livres for the purchase of a library—an important event which was doubtless the means of confirming his intellectual bias.

Voltaire’s first literary conceptions were formed in the Bastile, that infamous representative of despotic caprice, to which some verses of which he was the reputed author, satirising the licentious extravagance of the Court of the late king, Louis XIV., had consigned him at the age of twenty. Soon afterwards appeared the tragedy of Ædipe (founded upon the well-known dramas of Sophocles), the first modern drama in which the universal and traditional love scenes were discarded. This contempt for the conventionalities, however, excited the indignation of the play-goers, and the Ædipe was, at its first representation, hissed off the stage. The author found himself forced to sacrifice to the popular tastes, and his tragedy was received with applause. Two memorable verses indicated the bias of the future antagonist of ecclesiastical orthodoxy, and naturally provoked the hostility of the profession which he had dared so openly to assail:—

It was during this imprisonment, too, that he formed the first idea of the Henriade (or The League, as it was originally called), the only epic poem worthy of the name in the French language. A chance quarrel with an insolent courtier was the cause of Voltaire’s second incarceration in the Bastile with, at the end of six months, a peremptory order to absent himself from the capital. These experiences of despotic caprice and of sophisticated society he long afterwards embodied in two of his best romances, L’Ingénu and Micro-mégas (the “Little-Big Man”), one of the most exquisite productions of Satire.

The youthful victim of these malicious persecutions determined upon seeking refuge in England, whose freer air had already inspired Newton, Locke, Shaftesbury, and other eminent leaders of Thought. A flattering welcome awaited him—and subscriptions to the Henriade, better received here than in France, gratified his pride and filled his purse. During his sojourn of three years in this country, he made the most of his time in studying its best literature, and cultivating the acquaintance of its most eminent living writers. His tragedy of Brutus was followed by La Mort de César which, from its taint of liberalism, was not allowed to be printed[Pg 143] in France. Upon his return to Paris he published his Zaïre—finished in eighteen days—the first tragedy in which, deserting the footsteps of Corneille and Racine, he ventured to follow the bent of his own genius. The plan of Zaïre has been pronounced to be one of the most perfect ever contrived for the stage.

More important, by its influence upon contemporary thought, was his famous Letters on the English—a work designed to inform his countrymen generally of the literature, thought, and political and theological parties of the rival nation, and, more especially, of the discoveries of Newton and Locke. Descartes, at this moment supreme in France, had succeeded to the vacant throne of the so-called Aristotelian Schoolmen. His system, a great advance upon the old, broached some errors in physics, amongst others the theory of “Vortices” to explain the planetary movements. A much more pernicious and reprehensible error was his absurd denial of conscious feeling and intelligence to the lower races, which was admirably exposed by Voltaire in his Elémens de Newton and elsewhere. In England, Newton’s extraordinary discoveries had already made Descartes obsolete, as far as the savans were concerned at least, but the French scientific world still clung, for the most part, to the Cartesian principles. As for Locke, he had overturned the orthodox creed of “innate ideas,” supplying instead sensation and reflection. This advocacy of the new philosophy, added to the success of his tragedies for the theatre,

Amongst other subjects the Lettres (a masterpiece of criticism and sort of essays, since often imitated but seldom or never, perhaps, equalled in their kind) contains an admirable essay upon the Quakers, to whom he did justice. He introduces one of them in conversation with him, thus apologising for his eccentricities:

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About this period, frequenting less the fashionable and trifling society of the capital, and contenting himself with the company of a few congenial minds, he formed amongst others a sympathetic friendship with the Marquise de Châtelet, a lady of extraordinary talents.

The lady was the equal of Madame Dacier in knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages, and she was familiar with all the best modern writers. She wrote a commentary on Leibnitz. She also translated the Principia. Her favourite pursuits, however, were mathematics and metaphysics.

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Voltaire had already (1741) given to the world his Elémens de Newton—a work which, in conjunction with other parts of his writings, proves that had he chosen to apply himself wholly to natural philosophy or to mathematics he might have reached the highest fame in those departments of science. It is in the Elémens that Voltaire records his noble protest at the same time against the monstrous hypothesis of Descartes, to which we have already referred, and against the selfish cruelty of our species.

At Cirey some of his best tragedies were composed—Alzire, Mérope, and Mehemet; the Discours sur l’Homme, a moral poem in the style of Pope’s Essays, pronounced to be one of the finest monuments of French poetry; an Essay on Universal History, (for his friend’s use, to correct as well as supplement Bossuet’s splendid but little philosophic history), the foundation of perhaps his most admirable production the Essai sur les Mœurs et l’Esprit des Nations, and many lesser pieces, including a large correspondence. Besides these literary works, he engaged in mathematical and scientific studies, which resulted in some brochures of considerable value.

About this time (1740) news arrived of the death of Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. Most readers know the extraordinary character of this strange personage, who caned the women and his clergy in the streets of his capital, and who was with difficulty dissuaded from ordering his son’s execution. Narrowly escaping with his life the prince had devoted[Pg 146] himself to literary pursuits, and had kept up a correspondence with the leading men of letters of France, and above all with the author of Zaïre whom he regarded as little less than divine. The new king set about inspecting his territories, and proceeded incognito to Brussels, where the first interview between the two future most eminent persons in Europe took place. Repairing to his majesty’s quarters—

Voltaire received a pressing invitation to Berlin.

The French court wished to secure the alliance of Friedrich. No one seemed a more fitting mediator than his early counsellor, who was induced to accept the mission, and to set out for Berlin, where an enthusiastic welcome awaited him, apartments in the palace being placed at his disposal. Yet, in spite of the success of this and other public services, his enemies in Paris remained in full possession of the field. For the second time Voltaire sought admission into the Académie—an empty honour, the granting or refusal of which could neither add to nor detract from his fame. The prestige of that society, however, he seemed to consider essential to his safety against the increasing violence and formidable array of his enemies, who were bent on crushing him, by[Pg 147] whatever means. It was only by submitting to the mortification of qualifying some of his opinions that he at length succeeded in his object. Notwithstanding the address with which he manages his language, it were better, as his biographer—the Marquis de Condorcet—justly remarks, he had renounced the Académie than have had the weakness to submit to so evident a farce.

On succeeding to a vacant chair it was customary, besides a eulogy upon the deceased member, to speak in set terms of praise of Richelieu and Louis XIV. This traditional and servile practice the new Academician was the first to break through. Philosophy and literature were treated of in unaccustomed strains of freedom, and his good example has been influential on after generations.

A sort of experience he has finely illustrated in his romance of Zadig.

Stanislaus, the ex-king of Poland, was keeping his Court at Luneville, not far from Cirey, where he divided his time between his mistress and his confessor. To this royal retreat the friends of Cirey were invited, and the whole of the year 1749 was passed there. Meanwhile Madame de Châtelet died, and Voltaire, much affected by his loss, returned to Paris. Friedrich redoubled his solicitation with new hope.

The philosopher at length set out for Berlin, and his reception must have reached his highest expectations. We have no intention to repeat the account of this singular episode in his life, which has been so often narrated. Evenings of the most agreeable kind, abundance of wit, unrestrained conversation, the society of some of the most distinguished men of science of the time, the unbounded adoration of a royal host, eager, above all things, to retain so brilliant a guest—such were the pleasures of this palace of Alcina, as he calls it. But the imperious tempers of the two unequal friends soon proved the impossibility of a lasting entente, and rivalries amongst the literary courtiers hastened, if they did not effect, the final rupture.

After his escape from Berlin Voltaire passed a few weeks with the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha,[Pg 148] “the best of princesses, full of gentleness, discretion, and equanimity, and who, God be thanked, did not make verses” (alluding to his late host’s proclivities), and some days with the Landgrave of Hesse on his way to Frankfort. Literature had not suffered during the life at Berlin. Finishing touches were put to many of the tragedies—the Âge de Louis XIV. was completed, part of the Essai sur les Mœurs et l’Esprit des Nations written, La Pucelle (the least worthy of all his productions) corrected, and a poem, Sur la Loi Naturelle, composed (a work of a far better inspiration than the poem just mentioned, but which was publicly burned at Paris by the misdirected zeal of the bigots). In a later poem on the destruction of Lisbon, as well as in the romance of Candide, fired with indignation at the hypocrisies and mischiefs of the easy-going creed of Optimism (as generally understood), so welcome to self-complacent orthodoxy, he displayed all his vast powers of sarcasm in exposing its fatal absurdities. Leibnitz had been one of its most strenuous apologists. In the person of the wretched Pangloss the theory of “the best of all possible worlds,” and of the “eternal fitness of things,” is overwhelmed, indeed, with an excess of ridicule. It is to be lamented that the satirist allowed his sæva indignatio to overpower a proper sense of the proprieties of language and expression.

Voltaire was now become a potentate more dreaded than a sovereign-prince on his throne, an object of hatred and terror to political and other oppressors. After some hesitation he had chosen for his retreat the ever-memorable Ferney—a place within French territory, on the borders of Switzerland—and also a spot near Geneva, where he alternately resided, escaping at pleasure either from Catholic intolerance or from Puritanic rigour, with his niece—Madame Denis, who had anxiously attended him during a recent illness. From these retreats he made himself heard over all Europe in defence of reason and humanity. It was about this time (1756) that he employed his eloquence to save Admiral Byng, a victim to ministerial necessities, who was nevertheless condemned, as his advocate expresses it in Candide, “pour encourager les autres.” A like philanthropic effort, equally vain, was made on behalf of the still more unfortunate Comte de Lally.

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The year 1757 is memorable in literature as that in which he gave to the world an accurate edition of his already published works, enriched by one of his most meritorious productions, the Essai sur les Mœurs et l’Esprit des Nations, which now appeared in its complete form. History, the author justly complained, had hitherto been but a uniform chronicle of kings, courts, and court intrigues. The history of legislation, arts, sciences, commerce, morals, had been always, or almost always, neglected.

If the best historical works of the present day are a considerable improvement upon those which were in fashion before Voltaire’s critiques, the remarks of Condorcet are not altogether inapplicable to the popular and school manuals still in vogue. At all events this style of composing “history,” ridiculed by the wit of Lucian sixteen centuries before, was the universal method down to the appearance of the celebrated Essai.

Beginning with Charlemagne, it presents, in a rapid, concise, and philosophic style, the most important and interesting features, not only of European but of the world’s history, adorned with all the grace and ease of which he was always so consummate a master. Many there always are who conceive of philosophy and erudition only as enveloped in verbosity and obscurity. Dulness and learning in the common mind are convertible terms. The very transparency and clearness of his style were reproached to him as a sign of superficiality and want of exactness—the last faults which could be justly imputed to him. However, the influence of Voltaire became apparent in the productions of the English historical school, till then unknown, which soon afterwards arose. The Italian Vico, and Beaufort, in France, in the particular branch of Roman antiquity, and Bayle in general, had already contributed in some degree towards the founding of a critical school; but these attempts were partial only. To Voltaire belongs the honour of having applied the principles of criticism at once universally and popularly.

In reviewing the history and manners of the Hindus he repeatedly expresses his sympathy, more or less directly, with their aversion from the coarser living of the West:—

In noticing the comparative progress of the various foreign religions in India, Voltaire observes that—

This—one of the chief obstacles to the spread of Christian civilisation in the East, and especially in India, viz., the eating of flesh and the drinking of alcohol, its legitimate attendant—has been acknowledged by Christian missionaries themselves of late years.

Employed as he was in various literary undertakings he had been watching with great interest, not, perhaps, without a secret wish for vengeance, the important political and military complications of Europe. After some brilliant successes the Prussian king had been reduced to the last extremity. At this juncture the former friends agreed to forget, as far as possible, their old quarrel, and Voltaire enjoyed the satisfaction of having succeeded in dissuading Friedrich from suicide. The victories of Rosbach and Breslau not long afterwards changed the condition of things once again. From this time the prince and the philosopher resumed the[Pg 151] name, if not the cordiality, of friends. A curious accident put the arbitrament of peace and war for some weeks into the hands of Voltaire. The Prussian king, while inactive in his fortified camp, wrote, as his custom was, a quantity of verse and sent the packet to Ferney. Amongst the mass—good, bad, and indifferent—was a satire on Louis and his mistress. The packet had been opened before reaching its destination.

Several letters passed between the three before the danger was averted.

The limited space at our disposal will allow us only rapidly to notice some of the remaining chefs-d’œuvre of Voltaire. The celebrated Encyclopédie, under the auspices of D’Alembert and Diderot, had been lately commenced. To this great work, to which he looked with some hope as promising a severe assault on ignorance and prejudice, Voltaire contributed a few articles. It is not the place here to narrate the history of the fierce war of words to which the Encyclopédie gave birth. It was completed in about fifteen years, in 1775—a memorable year in literature.

The article which was particularly selected by the prosecution was that on the Soul, “one of the worst in the work, written by a poor doctor of the Sorbonne, who killed himself with declaiming, rightly or wrongly, against materialism.” The writers, as “encyclopédistes” and “philosophers” were long marked by those titles for the public opprobrium. This general persecution had the effect of uniting that party for common defence. For Voltaire himself an important advantage was[Pg 152] secured. Most of the principal men of letters and science, up to this time either avowed enemies or coldly-distant friends, henceforward enrolled themselves under his undisputed leadership.

About the same period he published a number of pieces, prose and verse, directed against his enemies of various kinds, theatrical as well as theological. Amongst the latter, conspicuous by their attacks, but still more so by their punishment, were Fréron and Desfontaines, whose chastisement was such that, according to Macaulay’s hyperbolic expression, “scourging, branding, pillorying would have been a trifle to it.” It is more pleasing, however, to turn from this fierce war of retaliation, in which neither party was free from blame, to proofs of the real benevolence of his disposition. We can merely note the strenuous efforts he made, unsolicited, on behalf of Admiral Byng and the Comte de Lally, and the still more meritorious labours in the less well-known histories of Calas and Serven. Not by these public acts alone did the man, who has been accused of malignity, discover the humanity of his character: to whose ready assistance in money, as well as in counsel, the unfortunate of the literary tribe and others acknowledged their obligations.

His Philosophie de l’Histoire, the prototype of its successors in name at least, was designed to expose that long-established and prevailing idolatry of Antiquity, which received everything bequeathed by it with astounding credulity. The Philosophie called forth a numerous host of small critics, to which men who knew, or ought to have known better, allied themselves. Their curious way of maintaining the credit of Antiquity afforded, as may be imagined, the author of the Defence of my Uncle, under which title Voltaire chose to defend himself, full scope for the exercise of his unrivalled powers of irony. Warburton, the pedant Bishop of Gloucester, with his odd theories about the “Divine Legation,” comes in for a share of this Dunciad sort of immortalisation.

A work of equal merit with the Philosophie are the Questions, addressed to the lovers of science, upon the Encyclopædia, wherein, in the form of a dictionary, he treats, as the Marquis de Condorcet eloquently describes,

[Pg 153]

It is with his romances that we are here chiefly concerned, since it is in those lighter productions of his genius that he has most especially allowed us to see his opinions upon flesh-eating. In the charming tale of The Princess of Babylon, her attendant Phœnix thus accounts to his mistress for the silence of his brethren of the inferior races:—

A certain king had the temerity to attack this innocent people:—

Her admirable instructor caused the princess to enter

[Pg 154]

Having occasion to visit the land par excellence of flesh-eaters, and being entertained at the house of a certain English lord, the hero, the amiable lover of the princess, is questioned by his host

Amabed, a young Hindu, writes from Europe to his affianced mistress his impressions of the Christian sacred books and, in particular, of Christian carnivorousness:—

In another letter to his old Hindu teacher from Rome, whither he had been induced to go by the missionaries, speaking of the feasts in that “citadel of the faith,” he writes:—

[Pg 155]

That one who hated and denounced injustice of all kinds, and who sympathised with the suffering of all innocent life, should thus characterise the cruelty of the Slaughter-House is what we might naturally look for; as also that he should denounce the kindred and even worse atrocity of the physiological Laboratory. And it is a strange and unaccountable fact that, amongst the humanitarians of his time, he stands apparently alone in condemnation of the secret tortures of the vivisectionists and pathologists—although, perhaps, the almost universal silence may be attributable, in part, to the very secresy of the experiments which only recent vigilance has fully detected. Exposing the equally absurd and arrogant denial of reason and intelligence to other animals, and instancing the dog, he proceeds:—

To the final triumph which in Paris awaited this champion of the weak, at the advanced age of 84, and the unexampled enthusiasm of the people, and the closing act of his eventful life, we can here merely refer. In Berlin, Friedrich ordered a solemn mass in the cathedral church in commemoration of his genius and virtues. A more enduring monument than any conventional mark of human vanity is the legacy which he left to posterity, which will last as long as the French language, and, still more, the humanity embodied in one of his later verses:—

The faults of his character and writings which, for the most part, lie on the surface (one of the most regretable of which was his sometimes servile flattery of men in power, and the only excuse for which was his eagerness to gain them over to moderation and justice) will be deemed by impartial criticism to have been more than counterbalanced by his real and substantial merits. That he allowed his ardent indignation to overmaster the sense of propriety in too many instances, in dealing with subjects which ought to be dealt with in a judicial and serious manner, is that fault in his writings which must always cause the greatest regret. In his discourse at his reception by the French Academy he remarks that[Pg 156] “the art of instruction, when it is perfect, in the long run, succeeds better than the art of sarcasm, because Satire dies with those who are the victims of it; while Reason and Virtue are eternal.” It would have been well, in many instances, had he practised this principle. But, however objectionably his convictions were sometimes expressed, his ardent love of truth and hatred of injustice have secured for him an imperishable fame; while Göthe’s estimate of his intellectual pre-eminence—that he has the greatest name in all Literature—is not likely soon to be disputed by Posterity.

THE founder of Modern Physiology was born at Berne. In 1723 he went to Tübingen to study medicine, afterwards to Leyden, where the famous Boerhaave was at the height of his reputation. Twelve years later he received the appointment of physician to the hospital at Berne; but soon afterwards he was invited by George II., as Elector of Hanover, to accept the professorship of anatomy and surgery at the University of Göttingen.

His scientific writings are extraordinarily numerous. From 1727 to 1777 he published nearly 200 treatises. His great work is his Elements of the Physiology of the Human Body (in Latin), 1757–1766—the most important treatise on medical science—or at least on anatomy and surgery—up to that time produced. The Icones Anatomicæ (“Anatomical Figures”) is “a marvellously accurate, well-engraved representation of the principal organs of the human body.” His writings are marked by unusual clearness of meaning, as well as by accurate and deep research.

We wish that we could here stop; but the force of truth compels us to affirm that, for us at least, his reputation, great as it is in science, has been for ever tarnished by his sacrifices—with frightful torture—of innocent victims on the altars of a selfish and sanguinary science.

One plea in extenuation of this callousness in regard to the suffering of other animals, and only one, can be offered in his defence. At this very moment, after all the humanitarian doctrine that has been preached during the century since the death of Haller, tortures of the[Pg 157] most cold-blooded kind are being inflicted on tens of thousands of horses, deer, dogs, rabbits, and others, in all the “laboratories” of Europe; while he had neither the prolonged experience of the uselessness of all such unnatural experimentation, of which the vivisectors and pathologists of our day are in possession, nor the same indoctrination of a higher morality, which has been the heritage of these latter days. The scientific barbarity of Haller does not affect the nature of his physiological testimony, which, it might be presumed, ought to be of some weight with his disciples and representatives of the present day. He asserts:—

IT might justly provoke expression of feeling stronger than that of astonishment, when we have to record that in South Europe (where climate and soil unite to recommend and render a humane manner of living[169] still more easy than in our colder regions) the followers, or, at all events, the prophets of the Reformed Diet have been conspicuously few. Since, by the à fortiori argument, if abundant experience and teaching have proved it to be more conducive to health in higher latitudes, much more is it evident that it must be fitting for the people of those parts of the globe nearer to the Equator.

Italy, which has produced Seneca, Cornaro, and Cocchi, is less obnoxious to the reproach of indifferentism in this most vitally-important branch of ethics than the western peninsula. But the “paradise of Europe” has yet to deserve the more glorious title of “the paradise of Peace,” and to atone (if, indeed, it be possible) for the cruel shedding of innocent, and in an especial degree superfluous, blood.

An eminent professor of medicine and of surgery, Antonio Cocchi distinguished himself also as a philologist. He was born at Benevento. Before giving himself up to the practice of medicine he devoted several years to the study of the old and the modern languages of Europe. His knowledge of English helped to bring him into contact with many[Pg 158] men of science in England, some of whom he met on his visit to London. Returning to Italy he was named Professor of Medicine at Pisa. He soon left that University for Florence, where he held the chair of Anatomy as well as of Philosophy. To him Florence was indebted for its Botanical Society, with which, in conjunction with Micheli, he endowed it.

He was a voluminous writer.[170] His Greek Surgical Books[171] contain valuable extracts from the Greek writers on medicine and surgery not before published. Amongst other writings may be distinguished his Treatise on the Use of Cold Baths by the Ancients.[172] The treatise which gives him a place in this work was published at Florence under the title of The Pythagorean Diet: for the Use of the Medical Faculty.[173]

Dr. Cocchi begins his little treatise with a eulogy and defence of the great reformer of Samos, and of his radical revolution in food. He cites the Greek and Latin writers, and especially the earlier Roman Laws, the Fannian and the Licinian. He proceeds:—

Cocchi cites the examples of the Greeks and of the Romans as proof that the non-flesh diet does not diminish courage or strength:—

[Pg 159]

His special motive to the publication of his treatise, however, was to vindicate the claims of the reformer of Samos upon the gratitude of men:—

FEW lives of writers of equal reputation have been exposed to our examination with the fulness and minuteness of the life of this the most eloquent name in French literature. With the exception of the great Latin father, St. Augustine, no other leader of thought, in fact, has so entirely revealed to us his inner life, his faults and weaknesses (often sufficiently startling), no less than the estimable parts of his character, and we remain in doubt whether more to lament the infirmities or to admire the candour of the autobiographer.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, son of a Genevan tradesman, had the misfortune to lose his mother at a very early age. It is to this want of maternal solicitude and fostering care that some of the errors in his after career may perhaps be traced. After a short experience of school discipline he was apprenticed to an engraver, whose coarse violence must injuriously have affected the nervous temperament of the sensitive child. Ill-treatment forced him to run away, and he found refuge with Mde. de Warens, a Swiss lady, a convert to Catholicism, who occupies a prominent place in the first period of his Confessions. Influenced by her kindness, and by the skilful arguments of his preceptors at the college at Turin, where she had placed him, the young Rousseau (like Bayle and Gibbon, before and after him, though from a different motive) abjured Protestantism, and, for the moment, accepted, or at least professed, the tenets of the old Orthodoxy. Dismissed from the college because he refused to take orders, he engaged himself as a domestic servant or valet.[Pg 160] He did not long remain in this position, and he resought the protection of his friend Mde. de Warens at Chambéry. His connexion with his too indulgent patroness terminated in the year 1740. For some years after this his life was of a most erratic, and not always edifying, kind. We find him employed in teaching at Lyons, and at another time acting as secretary to the French Embassy at Venice. In 1745 he came to Paris. There he earned a living by copying music. About this time he met with Therèse Levasseur, the daughter of his hostess, with whom he formed a lasting but unhappy connexion.

It was in 1748, at the age of 36, that he made the acquaintance, at the house of Mde. d’Epinay, of the editors of the Encyclopédie, D’Alembert and Diderot, who engaged him to write articles on music and upon other subjects in that first of comprehensive dictionaries. His first independent appearance in literature was in his essay on the question, “Whether the progress of science and of the arts has been favourable to the morals of mankind,” in which paradoxically he maintains the negative. It was the eloquence, we must suppose, rather than the reasoning, which gained him the prize awarded by the Académie of Dijon. His next production—a more important one—was his Discours sur l’Inegalité parmi les Hommes (“Discourse upon Inequality amongst Men”). In this treatise—the prelude to his more developed Contrat Social—Rousseau affirms the paradox of the natural school, as it may be termed, which alleged the state of nature—the life of the uncivilised man—to be the ideal condition of the species. His thesis that all men are born with equal rights takes a much more defensible position. In this Discours diet is assigned its due importance in relation to the welfare of communities.

The romance of Julie: ou la Nouvelle Héloise, which excited an unusual amount of interest, appeared in 1759. Emile: ou de l’Education, was given to the world three years later. It is the most important of his writings. In the education of Emile, or Emilius, he propounds his ideas upon one of the most interesting subjects which can engage attention—the right training of the young. The earlier part of the book is almost altogether admirable and useful. The later portion is more open to criticism, although not upon the grounds upon which was founded the hostility of the authorities of the day who unjustly condemned the book as irreligious and immoral. Rousseau begins with laying down the principles of a new and more rational method of rearing infants, agreeing, in many particulars, with the system of his predecessor, Locke. At least some of his protests against the unnatural treatment of children were not altogether in vain. Mothers in fashionable ranks of life began to recognise the mischief arising from[Pg 161] the common practice of putting their infants out to nurse in place of suckling them themselves. They began also to abandon the absurd custom of confining their limbs in mummy-like bandages. Nor, though long in bearing adequate fruit, were his denunciations of the barbarous severity of parents and schoolmasters without some result. He insists upon the incalculable evils of inoculating the young, according to the almost universal custom, with superstitious beliefs and fancies which grow with the growth of the recipient until they become radically fixed in the mind as by a natural development. Most important of all his innovations in education, and certainly the most heretical, is his recommendation of a pure dietary.

The publication of his treatise on education brought down a storm of persecution and opprobrium upon the author. The Contrat Social (in which he seemed to aim at subverting the political and social traditions, as he had in Emile the educational prejudices of the venerated Past) appearing soon afterwards added fuel to the flames. Rousseau found himself forced to flee from Paris, and he sought shelter in the territory of Geneva. But the authorities, unmindful of the old reputation of the land of freedom, refusing him an asylum, he proceeded to Neuchâtel, then under Prussian rule, where he was well received. From this retreat he replied to the attacks of the Archbishop of Paris, and addressed a letter to the magistrates of Geneva renouncing his citizenship. He also published Letters Written from the Mountain, severely criticising the civil and church government of his native canton. These acts did not tend to conciliate the goodwill of the rulers of the people with whom he had taken refuge. At this moment an object of dislike to all the Continental sovereign powers, he gladly embraced the offer of David Hume to find him an asylum in England. The social and political revolutionist arrived in London in 1766, and took up his residence in a village in Derbyshire. He did not remain long in this country, his irritable temperament inducing him too hastily to suspect the sincerity of the friendship of his host.

The next eight years of his life were passed in comparative obscurity, and in migrating from one place to another in the neighbourhood of Paris. In his solitude gardening and botanising occupied a large part of his leisure hours. It was at this period he made the acquaintance of Bernardin St. Pierre, his enthusiastic disciple, and immortalised as the author of Paul et Virginie. His end came suddenly. He had been settled only a few months in a cottage given him by one of his numerous aristocratic friends and admirers, when one morning, feeling unwell, he requested his wife to open the window that he[Pg 162] “might once more look on the lovely verdure of the fields,” and as he was expressing his delight at the exquisite beauty of the scene and of the skies he fell forward and instantly breathed his last. At his special request his place of burial was chosen on an island in a lake in the Park of Ermondville, a fitting resting-place for one of the most eloquent of the high priests of Nature.

His character (as we have already remarked) is revealed in his Confessions—which was written, in part, during his brief exile in England. It, as well as his other productions, shews him to us as a man of extraordinary sensibility, which, in regard to himself, occasionally degenerated into a sort of disease or, in popular language, morbidness (a word, by the way, constantly abused by the many who seem to excuse their own insensibility to surrounding evils by stigmatising with that vague expression the acuter feeling of the few), which sometimes assumed the appearance of partial unsoundness of mind. This it was that caused him to suspect and quarrel with his best friends, and which, we may suppose, led him, in his minute dissection of himself, to exaggerate his real moral infirmities.

In summing up his personal character we shall perhaps impartially judge him to have been, on the whole, amiable rather than admirable, of good impulses, and of a naturally humane disposition, cultivated by reading and reflection, but to have been wanting in firmness of mind and in that virtue so much esteemed in the school of Pythagoras—self control. His philosophy is distinguished rather by refinement than by vigour or depth of thought.

It is in the education of the young that Rousseau exerts his eloquence to enforce the importance of a non-flesh diet:—

[Pg 163]

Rousseau, in a free translation, here quotes a considerable part of Plutarch’s Essay. He insists, especially, that children should be early accustomed to the pure diet:—

[Pg 164]

In the Julie: ou la Nouvelle Heloise he describes his heroine as preferring the innocent feast:—

Although he was not a thorough or consistent abstainer, Rousseau speaks with enthusiasm of the pleasures of his frugal repasts, in which, it seems, when he was not seduced by the sumptuous dinners of his fashionable admirers, flesh, as a rule, had no part:—

KARL VON LINNÉ, or (according to the antiquated fashion of Latinising eminent names still retained) Linnæus, the distinguished Swedish naturalist, and the most eminent name in botanical literature, in a notable manner arrived at his destined immortality in spite of friends and fortune. Prophecies do not always fulfil themselves, and the estimate of his teachers that he was a hopeless “blockhead,” and the prediction that he would be of no intellectual worth in the world (they had advised his parents to apprentice him to a handicraft trade), are a conspicuous instance of the falsification of prophecy. After one year’s course of study at the University of Lund—where he had access to a good library and collections of natural history—he proceeded to the University of Upsala. There, upon an allowance by his father of £8 a year to meet all his expenses of living, he struggled desperately against the almost insuperable obstacles of extreme poverty, which forced him often to reduce his diet to one meal during the day. He was then at the age of 20. At length, by the hospitable friendship of the professor of botany, and a small income derived from a few pupils, Linné found himself free to devote himself to the great labour of his life. It was in the house of his host (Rudbeck) that he sketched the subject-matter of the important works he afterwards published. In 1731 he was[Pg 165] commissioned by his university to explore the vegetable life of Lapland. Within the space of five months he traversed alone, and with slender provision, some 4,000 miles. The result of this laborious expedition was his Flora Laponica.

Three years later, with the sum of fifteen pounds, which he had with great difficulty gathered together, he set out in search of some university where he might obtain the necessary degree of doctor in medicine at the least outlay, in order to gain a living by the practice of physic. He found the object of his search in Holland. In that country he met with a hospitable reception. During his residence in Holland he came over to England, and visited the botanical collections at Oxford and Eltham, with which the Swedish savant, it seems, had not much reason to be satisfied. Returning to Sweden, he began practice as a physician at the age of 31, and he lectured, by Government appointment, upon botany and mineralogy at Stockholm. His fame had now become European. He was in correspondence with some of the most eminent scientific men throughout the world. Books and collections were sent to him from every quarter, and his pupils supplied him with the results of their explorations in the three continents. He was elected to the Professorship of Medicine at Upsala, and (a vain addition to his real titles) he was soon afterwards “ennobled.”

The productions of his genius and industry during the twenty years from 1740 were astonishingly numerous. Besides his Systema Naturæ and Species Plantarum, his two most considerable works, he wrote a large number of dissertations, afterwards collected under the title of Amœnitates Academicæ—“Academic Delights.” Everything he wrote was received with the greatest respect by the scientific world. Upon his death the whole University of Upsala united in showing respect to his memory; sixteen doctors of medicine, old pupils, bearing the “pall,” and a general mourning was ordered throughout the land of his birth.