Читать книгу Owen's Moral Physiology; or, A Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question онлайн

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That such an instinct should be thought and spoken of as a low, selfish propensity, and, as such, that the discussion of its nature and consequences should be almost interdicted in what is called decent society, is to me a proof of the profligacy of the age, and the impurity of the pseudo-civilized mind. I imagine that if all men and women were gluttons and drunkards, they would, in like manner, be ashamed to speak of diet or of temperance.

Were I an optimist, and, as such, had I accustomed myself to judge and to admire the arrangements of nature, I should be inclined to put forward, as one of the most admirable, the arrangement according to which the temperate fulfilling of the dictates of this, as well as of almost all other instincts, confers pleasure. The desire of offspring would probably induce us to perpetuate the species, though no gratification were connected with the act. In the language of the optimist, then, “pleasure is gratuitously super-added.” But instead of pausing to admire arrangements and intentions, the great whole of which human reason seems little fitted to appreciate or comprehend, I content myself with remarking, that this very circumstance (in itself surely a fortunate one, inasmuch as it adds another to the sources of human happiness) has often been the cause of misery; and, from a blessing, has been perverted into a curse. Enjoyment has led to excess, and sometimes to tyranny and barbarous injustice.