Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/584

560 wish to see is what we wish to eat. If it were really indispensable, or, if not indispensable, at least in some way useful, it would be another thing. But it is useful for nothing, and serves only to develop animal feelings, to excite desire, to promote fornication and drunkenness.

And this is continually being confirmed by young, kind, undepraved people,—especially women and girls,—feeling, without knowing how it logically follows, that virtue is incompatible with beefsteaks, and giving up meat as soon as they desire to live good lives.

What, then, do I wish to say? That in order to be moral, people must cease to eat meat? Not at all.

I only wish to say that for a good life a certain order of good deeds is indispensable; that if a man's aspiration toward right living be serious, it will inevitably follow one definite sequence; and that in this sequence the first virtue a man will strive after will be temperance, self-renunciation. And in seeking to be temperate a man will inevitably follow one definite sequence, and in this sequence the first thing will be temperance in food, fasting. And in fasting, if he be really and seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food, because, to say nothing of the excitation of the passions caused by such food, its use is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an act which is contrary to the moral feeling—killing; and is called forth only by greediness, and the desire for savory food.

The precise reason why abstinence from animal food will be the first act of fasting and of a moral life is admirably explained in the book, "The Ethics of Diet;" and not by one man only, but by all mankind in the person of its best representatives during all the conscious life of humanity.