Intrinsically the first breakfast is, if anything, better than the second. There is more of it. It offers greater variety. It takes longer to eat it. It will stay by you longer. If you are at a hotel conducted on the American plan, you are getting more for your money.
Righteousness, however, is concerned with none of these considerations. What makes one breakfast better than the other is the way it fits into one's life as a whole. Which breakfast will enable you to do the best forenoon's work? Which one will give you acute headache and chronic dyspepsia? Immediate appetite cannot answer these questions. Reason is the only one of our three departments that can tell us what is good for the self as a whole. Now for most people in ordinary circumstances, reason prescribes the second breakfast, or something like it. The second breakfast fits into one's permanent plan of life. The work to be done in the forenoon, the feelings one will have in the afternoon, the general efficiency which we desire to maintain from day to day and year to year, all point to the second breakfast as the more adapted to promote the welfare of the self as a whole throughout the entire life history. If we eat the first breakfast, appetite rules and reason is thrust into subjection. The lower has conquered the higher; the part has domineered the whole. To eat such a breakfast, for ninety-nine men out of every hundred, would be gluttony. Yet, though eating it is vicious, the fault is not in the breakfast, not in the hunger for it; but in the fact that the appetite had its own way, regardless of the permanent interests of the self as a whole; and that so far forth reason was dethroned, and appetite set up as ruler in its place. Indeed there are circumstances in which the first breakfast would be the right one to choose. If one were on the borders of civilisation, setting out for a long tramp through the wilderness, where every ounce of food must be carried on his back, and no more fresh meat and home cooking could be expected for several days, even reason herself might prescribe the first breakfast as more beneficial to the whole man than the second. Precisely the same breakfast which is good in one set of circumstances becomes bad in another. The raw appetite of hunger is obviously neither good nor bad. The rule of appetite over reason and the whole self, however, is bad always, everywhere, and for everybody. It is in this rising up of the lower part of the self against the higher, and its sacrifice of the self as a whole to a particular gratification that all vice consists.