“‘She that lives in pleasure is dead while she lives.’ Hear this, ye women[95] who pass your time in revels and intemperance, and who neglect the poor, pining and perishing with hunger, whilst you are destroying yourselves with continual luxury. Thus you are the cause of two deaths--of those who are dying of want and of your own, both through ill-measure. If, out of your fulness, you tempered their want, you would save two lives. Why do you thus gorge your own body with excess, and waste that of the poor with want? Consider what comes of food--into what it is changed. Are you not disgusted at its being named? Why, then, be eager for such accumulations? The increase of luxury is but the multiplication of filth.[96] For Nature has her limits, and what is beyond these is not nourishment, but injury and the increase of ordure.
“Nourish the body, but do not destroy it. Food is called nourishment, to show that its purpose is not to hurt, but to support us. For this reason, perhaps, food passes into excrement that we may not be lovers of luxury. If it were not so--if it were not useless and injurious to the body, we should hardly abstain from devouring one another. If the belly received as much as it pleased, digested it, and conveyed it to the body, we should see battles and wars innumerable. Even as it is, when part of our food passes into ordure, part into blood, part into spurious and useless phlegm, we are, nevertheless, so addicted to luxury that we spend, perhaps, whole estates on a meal. The more richly we live, the more noisome are the odours with which we are filled.”--_Hom._ xiii. _Tim._ v.[97]
From this period--the fifth century A.D. down to the sixteenth--Christian and Western literature contains little or nothing which comes within the purpose of this work. The merits of monastic asceticism were more or less preached during all those ages, although constant abstinence from flesh was by no means the general practice even with the inmates of the stricter monastic or conventual establishments--at all events in the Latin Church. But we look in vain for traces of anything like the humanitarian feeling of Plutarch or Porphyry. The mental intelligence as well as capacities for physical suffering of the non-human races--necessarily resulting from an organisation in all essential points like to our own--was apparently wholly ignored; their just rights and claims upon human justice were disregarded and trampled under foot. Consistently with the universal estimate, they were treated as beings destitute of all feeling--as if, in fine, they are the “automatic machines” they are alleged to be by the Cartesians of the present day. In those terrible ages of gross ignorance, of superstition, of violence, and of injustice--in which human rights were seldom regarded--it would have been surprising indeed if any sort of regard had been displayed for the _non-human_ slaves. And yet an underlying and latent consciousness of the falseness of the general estimate sometimes made itself apparent in certain extraordinary and perverse fancies.[98] To Montaigne, the first to revive the humanitarianism of Plutarch, belongs the great merit of reasserting the natural rights of the helpless slaves of human tyranny.