THE PHILOSOPHY OF DIET. 819 



a wise and orderly method of eating to be a religious duty, and, though 

 the phrase might not quite pass muster in Exeter Hall, in some sense 

 it assuredly is so. In this wise, then, I may profess to be in touch 

 with religion, but in no other. Questions of faith and unfaith (as the 

 fashionable jargon has it) I have neither the ability nor the wish to 

 discuss. It were perhaps no bad thing for the happiness of the future 

 if the wish were as generally wanting to-day as the ability. But on 

 the interior economy of the human frame every man has a right to 

 his opinion. Like faith this, too, it may be said, must take its stand 

 mainly on the evidence of things not seen ; but the evidence, at least, 

 in this case, is of a more certain and palpable nature. By what meas- 

 ure and system of nourishment the bodily and mental powers may 

 best be encouraged and preserved, it is every man's duty to discover 

 for himself. If he has any word to say thereon it is, if not his duty, 

 at least his privilege to say it. This is one of the few points of human 

 interest on which every man has a right to say what he thinks, and no 

 man has a right to knock him down for saying it provided always, of 

 course, that what he says is based strictly on his own experience and 

 limited strictly to his own concerns. In this one instance only, no man 

 has the right to do unto his neighbor as he would do unto himself. 



Sir Henry Thompson thinks that our forefathers did not sufficiently 

 consider this great subject. Like Mr. Squeers, they have been, he ad- 

 mits, very particular of our morals. He sees a wise and lofty purpose 

 in the laws they have framed for the regulation of human conduct 

 and the satisfaction of the natural cravings of religious emotions. 

 But those other cravings equally common to human nature, those 

 grosser emotions, cravings of the physical body, they have disre- 

 garded. "No doubt," he says, "there has long been some practical 

 acknowledgment, on the part of a few educated persons, of the sim- 

 ple fact that a man's temper, and consequently most of his actions, 

 depend upon such an alternative as whether he habitually digests well 

 or ill ; whether the meals which he eats are properly converted into 

 healthy material, suitable for the ceaseless work of building up both 

 muscle and brain ; or whether unhealthy products constantly pollute 

 the course of nutritive supply. But the truth of that fact has never 

 been generally admitted to an extent at all comparable with its ex- 

 ceeding importance." Herein were our ancestors unwise. The rela- 

 tion between food and virtue Sir Henry maintains (as did Pythagoras 

 before him) to be a very close relation. His view of this relationship 

 is not the view of Pythagoras, who, as Malvolio knew, bade man not 

 to kill so much as a woodcock lest haply he might dispossess the soul 

 of his grandam. Plutarch also was averse to a too solid diet, for the 

 reason that it does " very much oppress " those who indulge therein, 

 and is apt to leave behind " malignant relics." Sir Henry, in his turn, 

 would not have men to be great eaters of beef, though he holds with 

 Plutarch rather than with Pythagoras, being (so far as I can judge) 



