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]

“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.”