Everyone, he fantasised, should move into communal barracks where food, ideas, passions and bodies could all be shared. These hothouses of sexual and mental intercourse would swap their pubescent youth with each other to ensure ‘the improvement of the species’, would institute peace, wisdom and, of course, vegetarianism. Although in favour of promiscuity, Stewart was also an early advocate of birth control and natural contraception, arguing that inflated populations only caused famine and helped tyrants to build larger armies.16 Stewart never married, but he admitted coyly ‘that self-denial of the fair sex was not rigorously practised by him’, and he defended a system of regulated prostitution.17
He had no religious qualms about sex. Like his friend Oswald – many of whose views he shared – Stewart was an outspoken atheist (still very unusual in British society, not to mention illegal). He conceded that religions provided a temporary bulwark against immorality, but he wished to replace their God-derived rules with an ethical system based on the idea that all beings were connected parts of the universe, a fact he liked to highlight by addressing his friends as ‘Dear fellow part of our common integer, Nature’.18 Stewart only escaped being prosecuted, suggested one friend, because his views were so outlandish they were regarded as obscure oddities rather than a threat.19
Despite his shocking opinions, which won him several enemies, Stewart maintained cordial relations with an array of British literary figures. The dissenter John Taylor, who was intimately acquainted with Stewart for many years, recalled that ‘I never knew a man with more diffusive benevolence, for he not only felt an interest in the welfare of mankind but of all sensitive nature.’ In Vienna, Michael Kelly (who also shared a mistress with Oswald) ‘had the pleasure to find the eccentric Walking Stewart’ arriving on foot from Calais, and remembered him as a highly accomplished man, an ‘enthusiast about music, although not about beef steaks; for, of the most tender … he would not touch a morsel; he lived entirely on vegetables.’20
In 1798–9 Stewart was spreading his revelations to innocent bystanders in Bath when he met the thirteen-year-old Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), later to become the great friend of Wordsworth and author of the Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821). De Quincey was overwhelmed by Stewart, and ten years later when he came to London as a young man he sought him out again. They formed a lasting friendship and De Quincey remained Stewart’s most outspoken advocate, keeping his memory alive in fashionable literary magazines for the next fifty years. For the twenty-year course of their friendship, he said, Stewart was ‘the most interesting by far of all my friends’, and ‘the most eloquent man … that I have ever known’, despite the ‘hybrid tincture to his diction’ picked up on his multitudinous travels. De Quincey acknowledged that Stewart caused great offence from ‘the uniform spirit of contempt which he manifests for all creeds alike’, but he insisted that he was ‘comprehensively benign’ with a ‘true grandeur of mind’ and a ‘very extraordinary genius’. ‘Animal food or wine he never allowed himself to use; or, in fact, anything but the Brahminical diet of milk, fruit and bread’; this in itself was perfectly harmless, and it kept him healthy, for he was ‘a fine specimen of the animal Man’. Stewart entertained a megalomaniac notion that the rulers of the world would conspire to destroy his works, so he instructed people to bury them for future generations, and asked De Quincey to translate them into Latin (who thankfully never fulfilled his promise). De Quincey compared his extraordinary walking feats with Wordsworth’s 175,000 miles of rambling in the Lake District, and he made a rather pathetic attempt to emulate them by walking round his garden.21
Stewart was a fellow opium-eater, and his vivid philosophical visions of tangible connections between all life forms seem to bear testimony to this fact. He claimed that travelling the globe had emancipated his mind from the fetters of national prejudices. The personal philosophy he developed during his survey of world cultures was an impressive fusion, drawing on common ideals from an eclectic mix of philosophies which aimed to propel humanity towards universal happiness.22
As an avowed Spinozist, Stewart revived the claim of the various seventeenth-century free-thinkers – Blount, Toland and the Turkish Spy – that the Pythagorean-Hindu doctrine of metempsychosis actually referred to the recycling of matter in the universe, according to which all beings were parts of one interconnected whole.23 Poring over the works of Sir William Jones and other Orientalists, Stewart absorbed the vital Hindu idea of oneness with the universe. Enlightenment was achieved, he said, when man learned ‘to identify self with all nature’.24 To this he added a materialist Epicurean explanation of karma according to which atoms participated in the sensations of the organism of which they were a part, and they carried the impression of those sensations even after leaving the body. This meant that any sort of violence, whether it be whipping a horse, oppressing farm-workers or picking flowers, contributed to universal suffering which would persist in an endless cycle of bad karma. Suffering in another being was really suffering in another part of our own ‘universal-self’. The atoms of a tyrant would one day join the bodies of his victimised subjects, and the atoms in a farmer would eventually experience the suffering of his slaughtered animals. Individuality was dissolved into the unity of nature and any violence increased suffering in the whole. Man, ‘though his mode may dissolve and disperse the eternal particles of matter, that composed it … live eternally in all surrounding nature’. Killing animals, he suggested, was not only cruel, but against our own interests; it was a violation of common sense.25
It was not just after death that organisms diffused their sensible atomic substance. Even in this life matter was always passing from one body to the next. ‘The human body emits every hour half a pound of matter … which … must attach itself to millions of beings, and participate in their sensation.’26 By the continuous flux of atomic effluvia, Stewart reckoned that the atoms in a hand that struck an animal could be absorbed into the victim and participate in the very suffering it inflicted; the atoms in a horsewhip could incorporate into the body of the horse it whipped. This, he claimed, was the true reason why human sympathy should spread from self, to family, to nation, to species, and finally to all living beings.
The Chinese, he said, had first discovered this cycle 5,000 years ago; it was adopted by the Egyptians, communicated to the Greeks under the title of To Pan, and thence to the Romans; it had recently been revived by Lord Bolingbroke (1678–1751) and received a vivid expression in Alexander Pope’s image of widening ripples on a lake in his Essay on Man: ‘See matter next, with various life endued,/ Press to one centre still, the general good.’ Or, as Stewart put it:
Nature, matter, essence, being’s whole,
Whose parts are join’d in body and in soul;
Now king, now subjects, slaves, now cattle, sod,
Now riding man, now million horses rod;
Matter besieging to besieged turn’d,
Now soldier burning, and now peasants burn’d;
The hunted hare transmutes to hunting dogs,
And whipping driver into slaves he flogs;
And though no agent memory remain,
The patient atoms feel augmented pain.27
The solution to suffering in the universe was to teach everyone ‘to liberate the brute creation, to fraternize man, and identify self with the whole of existence’. This was the answer to cruelty to animals, not the legislation that Lord Erskine was attempting to bring before Parliament. ‘The homo-ousiast, or man of nature,’ he explained, ‘who fears to communicate pain to the crust he eats, what tenderness, what benevolence must he ever feel for a sensitive fellow being; he would lift the worm from the path, lest some heedless fool might crush it, and save the drowning fly from his tea-cup.’28
In Stewart’s interconnected universe, the medical reasons for vegetarianism were not separate from the humanitarian reasons. Damaging oneself and causing suffering in one’s own body by eating a vitiated diet created bad karma just like killing animals. St
ewart combined Cullen’s opinion that meat caused irritation and plethora with Cheyne’s theory that it caused blockages, impeding physical and mental activity and inflaming ferocious passions. He also followed the radical quack James Graham in recommending purificatory mud baths and washing the penis with soap to combat venereal disease. If such measures failed, opined the tripped-out traveller, then flee the ‘excremental air’ of cities and take up opium.29
Stewart had a fetishistic concern with teeth: fibres of flesh, he warned, caught in their interstices and engendered caries. But it was equally pernicious to use toothpicks to dislodge them, for this tore the gums and allowed pestilential cold air into the body. Indeed, a vegetable diet was the only means by which the human race could survive. This was an urgent matter: for women, Stewart claimed, were so cursed with menstrual disorders and pain at childbirth, that when human nature reached the point at which reason overcame instinct, they would refuse to be mothers and ‘the species must be extinguished.’ The only remedy for this imminent catastrophe was the universal adoption of vegetarianism, for as his ‘travels, over various parts of the eastern world’ had demonstrated to him, ‘air, exercise, and vegitable diet’ spared Eastern women the pain they suffer in the West.30
Bizarre as Stewart’s ideas seem, they formed a meaningful part of a wider debate then raging about how to create the greatest possible amount of happiness in the world. This was the age of Utilitarianism, and most Utilitarians agreed that non-human sentient beings should be included in the sum of overall happiness – though opinions differed on how much weight to allow them. Indeed, Stewart frequently articulated his view in exactly the terminology of the Utilitarians as he advocated the ‘maxim of effecting the greatest possible good to the whole of nature’, and ‘the augmentation of good and the diminution of evil, to all sensitive life’.31 His karmic theory was an attempt to equalise the value attributed to human and non-human suffering, and thus fully enfranchise animals within the greater common good.
In essence, Stewart’s notion of interconnectedness was not so radically different from the ideas of many Utilitarians, who had themselves been influenced by the same Epicurean ‘pleasure principle’ and Pythagorean interconnectedness that inspired Stewart. As with Stewart, it was the Hindu consideration for animals that helped the nominal founder of Utilitarianism and philosophical radicalism, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), to identify the lacuna in Western legislation. ‘Under the Gentoo and Mahometan religions,’ wrote Bentham in his seminal Introduction to the Principle of Morals and Legislation (1789), ‘the interests of the rest of the animal creation seem to have met with some attention.’ Thus he observed:
The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum,* are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate.
To the delight of all future animal liberationists, Bentham swept aside the age-old question of animal reason, and insisted that ‘the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’32 This central contention, which reframed Rousseau’s argument in the Discourse on Inequality, showed that the capacity for sensation was enough to gain consideration in a moral code that was based on happiness. This remains one of the cornerstones of the current animal-rights debate, and it is the basis of the Utilitarian philosophy of the most eminent animal liberationist, Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University.33
However, contrary to the misleading statements peddled by historians eager to enrol him to the vegetarian cause, Bentham was emphatically not suggesting that it was wrong to kill animals.34 On the contrary, his argument was geared towards refuting the idea that animal sensation was a basis for vegetarianism; he joined the catalogue of counter-vegetarian sensibility writers and divine apologists, like Archbishop William King, who believed that the death meted out in the slaughterhouse was, or could theoretically be, painless. If death occurred without suffering, then it was no longer a bad thing for an animal to be killed. Life itself had no value, only pain and pleasure. Bentham even went as far as to argue that an animal could be better off being killed: ‘The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier, and by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature,’ and therefore ‘they are never the worse for being dead.’ So, he concluded, ‘there is very good reason why we should be suffered to eat such of them as we like to eat: we are the better for it, and they are never the worse.’ The furthest he was willing to go – just like all the other counter-vegetarians – was that we should not wilfully torment animals.
Such thinking proved infectious. Bentham’s Utilitarian godson John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) also thought the happiness of animals was a considerable part of the common good, but did not advocate vegetarianism. David Williams, who published his Lectures in the same year as Bentham, also agreed with his calculation. Philip Doddridge, in his Lectures on Pneumatology, Ethics, and Divinity (1794), elaborated that as well as meat making people happier by giving them ‘brisker spirits’, one should also add the happiness of all the people employed in the meat industry (an argument still very much in force today). Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who was also impressed by Hinduism and Buddhism, echoed Bentham in concluding that it was unnecessary for Europeans to be vegetarian like the Brahmins, because in the colder climate people would suffer more from the lack of meat than animals suffered ‘through quick and always unforeseen death’.35 Stewart differed from them in his decision that the pleasure of eating meat was outweighed by the suffering animals experienced on being eaten (and he thought meat wasn’t good for you anyway); and, second, he went a lot further in his definition of sensitive life.
Stewart’s extension of sense beyond the animal kingdom was by no means unheard of, however: the idea that all life was endued with sensitivity captivated the Romantics with enthusiastic love for the interconnected harmony of the natural world (an enthusiasm reinforced by their interest in Indian culture). The mimosa, a plant that retracts its leaves on being touched, fascinated Romantic writers, stimulating poems such as Percy Shelley’s ‘The Sensitive Plant’, and leading some to conclude that plants’ capacity for pleasure and pain was comparable to that of animals.36
The greatest progenitor of these ideas was Erasmus Darwin (1731 – 1802), the radical free-thinking physician and grandfather of Charles. His works provide an insight into Stewart’s: they agreed on many things, but their moral conclusions on meat-eating were directly opposed. Darwin enjoyed his hearty meals and grew so fat that he had a concave salient carved into his dining table to accommodate his belly: he was not going to let the greater common good squeeze him out from his meat-eating niche (though he did ultimately provide the vegetarians with their strongest Utilitarian argument).37
Darwin’s ‘Loves of the Plants’ (1794–5) – a lengthy poem with extensive discursive notes – proposed that flowers had sex lives very similar to our own, committing intentional acts of love-making and even adultery. In The Temple of Nature (1803) Darwin portrayed a whole universe animated by pleasure, and, as the scholar Ashton Nichols has shown, this provided an underpinning for the love of nature expressed in Keats’ nightingale and Wordsworth’s poems about daffodils: ‘every flower/ Enjoys the air it breathes’. Darwin injected this principle into the Utilitarian mandate: every living thing experiences ‘pains and pleasures’, he said, and the aim of everything was to ‘increase the sum total of organic happiness’.
Darwin’s concept of nature as an interconnected ecological cycle of pleasure creation was very close to Stewart’s: ‘every part of organic matter from the recrements of dead vegetable or an
imal bodies,’ wrote Darwin, ‘becomes again presently re-animated; which by increasing the number and quantity of living organisms … adds to the sum total of terrestrial happiness.’ Darwin’s pleasure principle enfranchised even microscopic organisms into the system of moral value. Indeed, the underlying measure of value was no longer confined to particular species. Once the value of life had been reduced to a unit of pleasure it no longer mattered to whom or what that pleasure belonged: ‘The sum total of the happiness of organized nature is probably increased rather than diminished, when one large old animal dies, and is converted into many thousand young ones.’ This was in line with Bentham’s argument that the death of one creature can be justified by the amount of pleasure its death could bring to others. This was essentially an ecological value system, which subsumed the value of individual organisms into the wider picture of the whole ecosystem.
Darwin, like Stewart, regarded Pythagorean metempsychosis as a representation of this ‘perpetual transmigration of matter from one body to another’. Like Stewart also, he regarded this as the basis of a universal ‘system of morality and benevolence, as all creatures thus became related to each other’. With a philosophy so close to Stewart’s, Darwin’s poetry inevitably sounded very similar:
With ceaseless change, how restless atoms pass,
From life to life, a transmigrating mass;
How the same organs, which to day compose
The poisonous henbane, or the fragrant rose,
May, with to morrow’s sun, new forms compile,
Frown in the Hero, in the Beauty smile.
Whence drew the enlighten’d Sage,* the moral plan,
The Bloodless Revolution Page 45
