From: altar@beaufort.sfu.ca (Ted Wayn Altar)
Subject: Percy Bysshe Shelley
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1992 23:24:44 GMT


     I wish no living thing to suffer pain
                    (from PROMETHEUS UNBOUND)

     The great romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) 
was deeply influenced by John Frank Newton's classic essay, THE RETURN 
TO NATURE, which has been credited as helping to inaugurate the
beginnings of the modern vegetarian movement.

     Shelley in turn practice vegetarianism and wrote 2 treatises
forwarding the practice of vegetarianism, A VINDICATION OF
NATURAL DIET in 1811 and ESSAY ON THE VEGETABLE DIET.  It should
therefore be no surprise that Mary Shelley's misunderstood,
forlorn, and mistreated "monster" in her novel, FRANKENSTEIN, was
a vegetarian.

     Shelley in his first essay invokes the now familiar argument
that a human's comparative anatomy is closer to that of the
frugivorous animals than to the carnivorous ones.  Shelly even
held that "the depravity of the physical and moral nature of man
originated in his unnatural habits of life".  Shelley thought
that dietary reform "strikes at the rood of the evil".   He did
qualify this strong statement, however, by noting that a simple
diet would of course fail to provide solutions to all the ills of
the world, but it would at least address the injustice towards
how we keep and slaughter our food animals, and it would even
help countries to become more self-sufficient with respect to
food.

     Shelley in his second essay also noted that there is a close
relationship between our everyday practices and cogntive-moral
status.   Hence, a person who is only concerned about his health
cannot be bothered with the higher considerations that a
vegetarian diet could evince.


     The super-eminence of man is, like Satan's, the super-
     eminence of pain; and the majority of his species doomed to
     poverty, disease and crime, have reason to curse the
     untoward event that, by enabling him to communicate his
     sensations, raised him above the level of his fellow
     animals.  The the steps that have been taken are
     irrevocable.  The whole of human science is comprised in one
     question:  How can the advantages of intellect and
     civilisation be reconciled with the liberty and pure
     pleasures of natural life?  How can we take the benefits and
     reject the evils of the system which is now interwoven with
     he fire of our being?  I believe that abstinence from animal
     food and spiritous liquors would, in a great measure,
     capacitate us for the solution of this important question.
               (from A VINDICATION OF NATURAL DIET)

Thus, for Shelley, intoxicants and "irritating foods" both
disturb the mental faculties, one directly and the other by
participating in the injustice and violence that needs to be
addressed.

     I address myself not to the young enthusiast only, but to
     the ardent devotee of truth and virtue -- the pure and
     passionate moralist yet unvitiated by the contagion of the
     world.  He will embrace a pure system from its abstract
     truth, its beauty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide
     extended benefit.  Unless custome has turned poison into
     food, he will hate the brutal pleasures of the chase by
     instinct.  It will be a contemplation full of horror and
     disappointment to the mind that beings, capable of the
     gentlest and most admirable sympathies, should take delight
     in the deathpangs and the last convulsions of dying animals.
               (ibid)
               
     
     
Shelley's poem, QUEEN MAB was subtitled "A Philosophical Poem
with Notes" and dedicated to Harriet, expresses many of Shelley's
sentiments and thoughts about vegetarianism and our relationship
with nature.

               No longer now
     He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,
     And horribly devours his mangled flesh;
     Which, still avenging nature's broken law,
     Kindled all putrid humours in his frame,
     All evil passions, and all vain belief,
     hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind,
     The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime.
     No longer now the winged habitants,
     That in the woods their sweet live sing away,
     Flee from the form of man; but gather round,
     And prune their sunny feathers on the hands
     Which little children stretch in friendly sport
     Towards these dreadless partners of their play.
     
     
     
Shortly after writing QUEEN MAB, Shelley wrote his ESSAY ON THE
VEGETABLE DIET:

     It is evident that those who are necessitated by their
     profession to trifle with the sacredness of life, and think
     lightly of the agonies of living beings, are unfit for the
     benevolence and justice which is required for the
     performance of the offices of civilised society.  They are
     by necessity brutal, coarse, turbulent and sanguinary.
     Their habits form an admirable apprenticeship to the more
     wasting wickedness of war, in which men are hired to mangle
     and murder their fellow beings by thousands, that tyrants
     and countries may profit.  How can he be expected to
     preserve a vivid sensibility to the benevolent sympathies of
     our nature, who is familiar with carnage, agony and groans?
     the very sight of animals in the fields who are destined to
     the axe must encourage obduracy if it fails to awaken
     compassion.  The butchering of harmless animals cannot fail
     to produce much of that spirit of insane and hideous
     exultation in which news of a victory is related altho'
     purchased by the massacre of a hundred thousand men.  If the
     use of animal food be, in consequence, subversive to the
     peace of human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice
     and barbarity which is exercised toward these miserable
     victims.  they are called into existence by human artifice
     that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of
     slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated,
     their social feelings outraged.  It were much better that a
     sentient being should never have existed, than that it
     should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.  (The
     attachment of animals to their young is very strong.  The
     monstrous sophism that beasts re pure unfeeling machines,
     and do not reason, scarcely requires a confutation.)
          (from ON THE VEGETABLE SYSTEM OF DIET)


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