If a man can get no other food it is more natural for him to kill another
man and eat him than to starve. Our horror is rather at the
circumstances that make it natural for the man to do this than at the man
himself. So with other things the desire for which is inherited through
countless ancestors, it is more natural for men to obtain the nearest
thing they can to these, even by the most abnormal means if the ordinary
channels are closed, than to forego them altogether. The abnormal growth
should be regarded as disease but, nevertheless, as showing more health
and vigour than no growth at all would do. I said this in _Life and
Habit_ (ch. iii. p. 52) when I wrote “it is more righteous in a man that
he should eat strange food and that his cheek so much as lank not, than
that he should starve if the strange food be at his command.” {30}