APPETITE——CONTINENCE.
Appetite, in a general sense, means a natural degree of hunger (not
craving), sufficient to give relish for any kind of wholesome food. “We
often hear people say they have no taste for this or that article of plain
food, although many such have an insatiable appetite for all the dainties
of the table. Morbid appetites are thus engendered by continuous habits of
indulgence. Natural appetites are first enfeebled and then vitiated;
health of body is slowly and insidiously impaired, until, by and by,
innate nobility and hopeful youth and strength become effeminate,
fastidious, weak, irascible, and selfish; and though outwardly, perhaps,
refined and delicate, the person inwardly becomes inactive, apathetic, and
unhelpful to himself and to the world. The natural sun of heat and life
within the body and the soul, being overcast by the clouds and exhalations
of unhealthy organs, often leads the victim of self-indulgence to seek
externally for artificial stimulants to keep up an appearance of genial
warmth within——but this can only be apparently successful for a time; and
soon the penalty of the transgression of the laws of nature must be paid
in full, and with, a large additional amount of costs. It is of great
importance, therefore, to watch the appetites of body and of mind; to
study the laws of healthy equilibrium; and, above all, to learn to know
and understand the dangers of prolonged self-indulgence of the appetites
of pleasure in mere animal sensation and wild imagination. Appetite,
properly so called, apprises man of the natural wants of the organism, and
compliance with these internal promptings is rewarded by the double
pleasure of the sense of taste in eating, and the feeling of comfort
within, arising from the food supplied to the digestive system. But where
the mind is weak and the delights of bodily sensation strong, the
pleasures of taste or the charm of varied sensations in the palate dwell
on the imagination and excite it to renewed indulgence of physical
sensations, irrespective of the wants of the internal organism, and this
even notwithstanding its declining health and manifest debility.” The
morbid cravings of the sense of perverted taste, or any other sense, must
not be confounded, therefore, with the natural appetite excited by the
wants of the internal organism. “In the bear tribes there is a marked
preference for honey manifested, which reveals a sense of taste that works
on the imagination, and leads him to incur the risk of being stung to
death by an infuriated swarm of bees rather than forego the sensual
delights of plundering the hive and licking out the honeycomb when he is
master of the spoils. The swollen head and face and ears are nothing to
the charm of sensual indulgence.” When I observe the sufferers from
sick-headache or neuralgia (see Rheumatism), with swollen face and
bandaged head, I am forcibly reminded of the honey-loving bear.
No expert can observe the habits of the people and fail to account for all
the diseases that afflict the human family. Victims of disobedience to the
natural laws——they have done the things they ought not to have done, and
have left undone the things they ought to have done, and (consequently)
there is no health in them. Diseases——how slowly we accept their
teaching——how blind we are to their warning voice! The word itself is not
understood. The term disease is popularly applied only to the most serious
forms, such as have been named, when it is properly applicable to any
condition other than the normal condition of the body——perfect ease.
Acidity, heartburn, flatulence, slight pains in the head, uneasy
sensations of whatever sort——so little regarded until too late——are they
not dis-ease? They speak plainly of indigestion,——the causes of which are
recited elsewhere;——they are to the body what the degree-points are to the
thermometer, and require only to be conscientiously considered to ensure
freedom from disturbance.
Other appetites there are which become morbid and too often control the
individual, instead of being themselves under entire subjection to him.
The unnatural habits of our civilization have caused the race to depart
from the natural instinct of
CONTINENCE
which, to the minds of many, is as essential to the moral and physical
health of the race after, as to its “virtue” before, marriage; and which,
but for the inflammatory nature of the diet in general use, and the
disorders arising therefrom, might easily be practiced by all
conscientious and thoughtful people. A radical modification of the
prevailing dietetic practices would lessen, immeasurably, the constant
warfare between the moral desires and the animal propensities, to which
both the married and the single are subjected, and which results in
disaster in so many instances. “Marital excesses often produce in the
offspring sexual precocity and passions which, under the influence of an
unwholesome and stimulating dietary, are rendered ungovernable, and entail
a vast deal of shame and sorrow throughout the lives of those who are
‘more sinned against than sinning.’ Verily the sins of the parents shall
be visited upon the children even to the third and fourth generation of
them that hate Him and violate His law.”[92]
[Footnote 92: Chapter on “Health Hints” in “How To Feed The Baby.”]
“Ah! my friends,” said the Rev. F. W. Farrar, Canon of Westminster Abbey,
“how vast a part of human disease results, not only from the ignorance but
also from the folly and sin of man. Typhoid, leprosy, small-pox, and
jail-fever are not by any means the only diseases which might be almost,
if not quite, eliminated from among us. We talk with deep self-pity of the
ravages of gout and cancer and consumption and mental alienation. _Alas!
how many of these might in one or two generations cease to be, if we all
lived the wise and temperate and happy lives which Nature meant us to
lead!_ And the voice of Nature, rightly interpreted, is ever the voice of
God. Even the simplest of us are superfluous in our demands, and the vast
majority of men so live as, more or less, habitually to pamper the
appetite by wasteful extravagance and weaken the health by baneful
luxuries. By unwholesome narcotics, by burning and adulterated stimulants,
by many and highly-seasoned meats, by thus storing the blood with
unnatural elements which it can not assimilate, they clog and carnalize
the aspirations which they should cherish, and feed into uncontrollable
force the passions which they should control. Hence it is that millions of
lives are like sweet bells jangled out of tune; and millions of men in
these days, like the Israelites of old, are laid to rest in _Kibroth
Hattaavah_——the graves of lust!
“And the sad thing is that this heavy punishment ends not with the
individual. It is not only that the boy when he has marred his own
boyhood, hands on its moral results to the youth; and the youth when he
has marred them yet more irretrievably hands them on to the man that he
may finish the task of that perdition;——but alas! the man also hands them
on to his innocent children, and they are born with bodies tormented with
the disproportionate impulses, sickly with the morbid cravings, enfeebled
by the increasing degeneracy, tainted by the retributive disease of guilty
parents.”
We must remember, says Albert Leffingwell, quoting the above in “Laws of
Life,” that he who speaks thus is no obscure Boanerges, vaguely ranting
over abstract sin, but one of the few great preachers in the Church of
England, speaking in the most venerable religious edifice in Protestant
Christendom.
The most persistent and thorough cramming of our youth with high moral
precepts avails but little, after all,——we observe this constantly,——to
counteract the fierce impulses of an unbalanced physical state.
Says the Duke of Argyle: “The truth is, that we are born into a system of
things in which every act carries with it, by indissoluble ties, a long
train of consequences reaching to the most distant future, and which for
the whole course of time affect our own condition, the condition of other
men, and even the conditions of external nature. And yet we can not see
those consequences beyond the shortest way, and very often those which lie
nearest are in the highest degree deceptive as an index to ultimate
results. Neither pain nor pleasure can be accepted as a guide. With the
lower animals, indeed, these, for the most part tell the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth. Appetite is all that the creature has,
and in the gratification of it the highest law of the animal being is
fulfilled. In man, too, appetite has its own indispensable function to
discharge. But it is a lower function, and amounts to nothing more than
that of furnishing to Reason a few of the primary data on which it has to
work——a few, and a few only. Physical pain is indeed one of the
threatenings of natural authority; and physical pleasure is one of its
rewards. But neither the one nor the other forms more than a mere
fraction of that awful and imperial code under which we live. It is the
code of an everlasting kingdom, and of a jurisprudence which endures
throughout all ages.” ... “It is no mere failure to realize aspirations
which are vague and imaginary that constitutes this exceptional element
(the persistent tendency of his development to take a wrong direction) in
the history and in the actual conditions of mankind. That which
constitutes the terrible anomaly of his case admits of perfectly clear and
specific definition. Man has been and still is a constant prey to
appetites which are morbid——to opinions which are irrational, to
imaginings which are horrible, and to practices which are destructive. The
prevalence and the power of these in a great variety of forms and of
degrees is a fact with which we are familiar——so familiar, indeed, that we
fail to be duly impressed with the strangeness and the mystery which
really belong to it. All savage races are bowed and bent under the yoke of
their own perverted instincts——instincts which generally in their root and
origin have an obvious utility, but which in their actual development are
the source of miseries without number and without end. Some of the most
horrible perversions which are prevalent among savages, (and which to a
greater or less degree affect all civilized peoples), have no counterpart
among any other created beings, and when judged by the barest standard of
utility, place man immeasurably below the level of the beasts. We are
accustomed to say of many of the habits of savage life that they are
‘brutal.’ But this is entirely to misrepresent the place which they really
occupy in the system of Nature. None of the brutes have any such perverted
dispositions; none of them are ever subject to the destructive operation
of such habits as are common among men. And the contrast is all the more
remarkable when we consider that the very worst of these habits affect
conditions of life which the lower animals share with us, and in which any
departure from those natural laws which they universally obey, must
necessarily produce, and do actually produce, consequences so destructive
as to endanger the very existence of the race. Such are all those
conditions of life affecting the relation of the sexes which are common to
all creatures, and in which man alone exhibits the widest and most
hopeless divergence from the order of Nature.”