In addition to all these arguments, it can be shown that a vegetarian diet improves and renders more acute the various senses. Sight and smell, taste and hearing—all are influenced—in some cases more than in others. Frequently patients are enabled to see distances or to smell odours, after living on this diet for some weeks, which they have never been able to do before. The appetite no longer craves the highly-seasoned and stimulating articles of food formerly desired, but is content with the simpler foods. The general acuteness and sense of well-being will more than compensate for any feeling of deprivation that may at first follow the abolition of meat from the diet. There can be no question that the food exerts a tremendous influence over the mental, moral, and emotional life. Says Dr Haig[25]:
“I believe that as the result of a rational, natural and proper diet, producing the best circulation in the great power-house of the human body, we shall get not only freedom from gross disease, but that we shall get, developing gradually, conditions of mind, thought, judgment, and morality, which will, in the future be as different from what they have been in a diseased and degraded past as the light of Heaven is different from the darkness of the dungeon; and that while there are to-day many things in human nature which all believers in the great, and good, and true, can only most heartily deplore, I believe that in the future there will be more harmony, more strength, more beauty, more unselfishness, more love—in a word, a truer and greater and more complete _sanity_.”
It can be shown, further, that the length of individual life as well as its usefulness and freedom from disease, are dependent largely upon the character of the diet. Longevity, properly so-called, is not a prolongation of the period of decrepitude and helplessness, as some imagine; but an extension of that period of life when men can fully appreciate the blessings of existence. It has been proved that any animal should live, roughly speaking, five times as long as it takes to mature. The dog matures at two, and lives, on an average, until it is ten; and so on, throughout the animal world. Man, who matures at (say) twenty, should live to be at least one hundred, and probably more, without showing any of the signs of decrepitude and imbecility which at present frequently accompany old age. As a matter of fact, we find that the average length of life is a fraction over forty-two years; and, in addition to this, these forty-two years are filled with diverse diseases and miseries, which should at no time afflict the individual. _Something_, therefore, is wrong, producing this result. In some way we are consciously or unconsciously perverting the laws of Nature. Now, in no way do we so flagrantly and so continually pervert her laws as in this question of food; and we can for this reason account both for the sicknesses which occur—these being engendered by depraved conditions of the body—and for the shortening of life, which we perceive about us on every hand. Philosophically, as well as practically, this should be so. As Dr Graham pointed out years ago: “A life cannot be both _in_tensive and _ex_tensive.” And the more it approaches the one, the less can it approach the other. Anything which tends to rapid living—or, what is perhaps the same thing, rapid bodily consumption or combustion—will consequently tend to shorten life. All stimulants would, of course, produce this effect; and, as meat is a highly stimulating article of food, it will be seen that its consumption, if long continued, will ultimately tend to devitalise and wear out the body—for the reason that it hastens the vital wear and tear, and consequently shortens life. This is, further, in agreement with the fact that “the heart of the habitual meat-eater beats from 72 to 80 beats a minute, while that of the person living on a pure diet of fruits, nuts, etc., will beat ten times less per minute. Fifteen hundred extra heart strokes every twenty-four hours makes a very appreciable strain upon the vital forces.”[26]