“Medical men teach us that animal food is more stimulating. Here, for once, the premise is true. But stimulation and nutrition happen to be antagonistic ideas. Just so far as a thing stimulates, it does not nourish. Just so far as it nourishes, it does not stimulate.
“There is no more widespread delusion on earth than this, which confounds stimulation and nutrition. This is the parent source of that awful error—or, rather multitude of errors—which are leading all the nations of the earth into all manner of riotous living, and urging them on in the road to swift destruction. This terrible mistake is the prime cause of all the gluttony, all the drunkenness, all the dissipation, all the debauchery in the world—I had almost said, of all the vice and crime also.
“But what is this stimulus of animal food? Let us see if we cannot understand it. What is a stimulant? It is anything which the vital powers resist with violence and expel with energy. The disturbance of the organism which denotes this resistance, constituting a kind of feverishness, is stimulation. It is a morbid process. It is disease, hence a wasting process. Medical books have a class of medicines which are called stimulants. They are all poisons, and not foods. Among them are alcohol, phosphorus, ammonia, cayenne pepper, etc. Anything which is foreign to the organism may provoke vital resistance, and in this sense be called a stimulant.
“But how does animal food stimulate? It always contains more or less effete materials—the debris of the disintegrated tissues, the ashes of the decayed organism—with more or less of other excrementitious matters. These impurities cannot be used in the organism, and therefore must be expelled; and this expulsive process, amounting to a feverish disturbance, this vital resistance, is precisely the _rationale_ of the stimulating effects of animal food. And thus we prove that animal food is impure precisely in the ratio that it is stimulating, and for this reason objectionable.
“All that can be alleged in favour of flesh-eating because of its stimulating properties can be urged, and for precisely the same reasons, in favour of brandy-drinking or arsenic-eating.”[22]
[22] “Scientific Basis of Vegetarianism,” pp. 23-24.