Cure for excess of appetite. If in eating and drinking, let the patient contemplate the vileness of the indulgence, and the meanness of those partaking in it, as well as the trials and evils it induces: such as degradation, humiliation, lapse of honor, loss of reverence; with every description of evil pro­ducible by exhaustion of intellect and incidence of stupidity, and the outbreak of all the complaints which, according to the plainest principles of medi­cine, it produces. It is a maxim with physicians, that all diseases proceed from excess in eating and drinking. His holiness the first of aphorists has likewise said, “Eat with a portion only of your stomachs, and ye shall be well;” and again, “The stomach is the root of all malady.”*

But if the patient’s appetite is to venery, in addi­tion to the previous considerations he must observe, how the most cogent of all causes to weakness in body and decay in mind, curtailment of life, and ruin of property, is this very appetite for venery. Imām Ghazāly, the defender of the faith, has com­pared this appetite to an unjust administrator, who, were the prince to give him the rein, would take possession of the subjects’ property, and reduce them to poverty and want, without applying it to enriching the treasury or paying the troops. So too the power of lust, if not restrained by an over­ruling intellect, would expend on its own purposes all the wholesome supplies and requisite juices pro­cured from its vassals, the powers of nutrition, to the exhaustion of all the members and faculties. But when, under the direction of reason, in the course of equity and to a proper degree, it limits itself to the perpetuation of the kind, it resembles an administrator, who, collecting revenue in the course of justice, devotes it to the interests of his sovereign’s dominions; such as fortifying defiles, repair­ing bridges, and paying troops. Let him consider likewise that different women are more like each other in the power of pleasing,* than are different dishes in the power of satisfying hunger.* In like manner, then, as it would be abhorrent from reason to leave the meats your own home affords, and go round to other houses begging at the doors for the like of them, it should be held disgraceful to slight the privileges sanctioned by reason and reli­gion, and leave one’s own lawful wife to trespass upon interdicted grounds, and taste the fruits of im­purity, in defiance of all the ill consequences which law and reason tell us it induces. We have it in a dictum of the Sanctified, “Women occasion the curtailment both of life and fortune;” and in the Psalms we find it said, “Loss of sufficiency in for­tune is the smallest of the evils to which the lascivious man is subject.”* Were we to give the reins entirely up to this passion, it would reach to such a height, that were there for instance but one woman in the world whom we had not got at, we should fancy some satisfaction from mastering her, such as was not to be supposed of any other. All this may be termed the height of ignorance and folly; from which and from all other attendant evils, we may be secured by a timely and moderate exercise of the appetent power.

Now here there is a school* who have placed love among the diseases of appetite, and asserted it to be the most pernicious of any to which this faculty is liable; being itself the devotion of the feelings through overwhelming desire to the pursuit of one particular person; and its cure, the turning of the thoughts from that person, and engagement of them in strict studies and amusing occupations, such as demand particular attention and surpassing care; together with the reduction of the appetite by purging away the stimulant matter, and using anti-phlogistic remedies.* This however applies only to animal love, which takes its rise from excess of appetite. Spiritual love, which arises from harmony of souls, is not to be reckoned a vice; but, on the contrary, a species of virtue.*

A refined nature may be said to be powerfully attracted to the forms of beauty by the general law of specific affinity, which is itself a cause of coali­tion. In discoursing upon equity, the secret of this matter having been pointed out already, our present purpose may be answered by the following observa­tions. The nobler and better the equipoise of per­sonal temperament may be, the stronger is the soul’s attraction to fine forms, sweet sounds,* and admirable qualities. For assuredly when both buds of perfection expand themselves in one and the same atmosphere, and both off-shoots of equipoise are fed from one and the same fountain, they must manifest a tendency to communion, which is the essence of love. When this noble relation is estab­lished in any two indices, difference of capacity and peculiarity of habit will cause its developement to a fuller and higher degree in one, and to a lower and lesser degree in the other. Loving-ness then takes root on the side of the deficiency, and loved-ness* displays its attractions on the side of the surplus; the former courting secrecy and suppression,* the latter arrogating declaration and permanence. Hence with regard to amicable numbers, that is, two num­bers such that the divisors of each make up the sum of the other, like 220 and 284, the wise assert that if two persons agree in any matter (as of food, &c.) by the expression of these numbers;* and each keep by him an amulet* inscribed according to one of them, there is no doubt of affection and concord being established between the two; the lesser number being used to denote love, and the greater to denote the beloved.

This is that love, the watchword of the theologi­cal divines, which contributes so much to harmo­nizing the disposition and enlightening the mind. No sooner does this sun of the moral world, for such may love be termed, (agreeably to the text, It illu­minated the earth with the lustre of its Lord,) dawn upon the mental horizon, than the thick darkness of natural inclination retreats in the opposite direc­tion, and rolls itself away. This fire which inflames the universe, (and of which the mystery is thus expressed, it abideth not, neither doth it pass away,) no sooner does it enkindle the rubbish of our lives, than the propensities of disposition are altogether consumed.*

Hence the wise have said, there are three things conducive to excellence of intellect and benevolence of mind: “chaste liaison, sober reason, and a word from the wise spoken in season.”* Indeed, the elders of the Súfy persuasion recommend a stu­dent to commence with the science of love.*

Among the Prophet’s dicta is the following: “He that loves, shuns, conceals, and dies; dies the death of a martyr:” and again, “God knoweth, goodliness must be dear to the good.” Zúlnún of Egypt used to say, “He that yearns for God, yearns for all delight and all beauty.” That prince of erotics, Abú Muhammad Rozbahān, expresses himself thus: “The traits of divinity may certainly descend upon humanity* — the human, indeed, is only a reflex of the divine beauty.”

The truth is, according to that law whereby we are taught that the principle of the radix reaches to the extremities, the tendencies of eternal love pene­trate the inmost recesses of all created things; the essences of beings are manifested only as component particles in an effluence from that love, the initia­tive of all, I loved that I might be known. That same effluence it is, which, displayed in the heavens in the form of appetent tendency, is the cause of circular motion; pervading the elements in the quality of physical tendency, is the cause of nutri­ment and developement of vegetables; is rooted in animals in the form of cupidinous faculty, and unfolded in the perfected minds of men in the quality of spiritual love. And if any one should speed with open-eyed intelligence about the naked world, if he should mount from that transcendent class who are purified from the stains of their conformation to the region of the spheres,* and thence should plunge again to the centre of earth, he would find no atom unpossessed of this effluence which we term love.*

Which movement, indeed, of love throughout cre­ation, the greatest philosophers have demonstrated.

The distinction, however, between spiritual and animal love being difficult, and few having power to control their appetent powers and physical propen­sities, (for

and those strenuous wayfarers who can throw their love open to the invasions of self-command, and die the death of desire, out of the way of bodily passions and cupidinous delights, being rarer than the philosopher’s stone; as most men are bondsmen to desire, and have never thrown off the yoke of propensity, calling crime by the name of love, and laying claim to the highest perfection of humanity on the strength of attributes belonging to the brute; slaves as they are to appetite, arrogating the rank of nobility — alas, alas,

perhaps for this reason abstinence may be the safer course. “Live single: for as to love, its beginning is want, its middle sickness, and its end death. In this advice lies the science of passion; but to thee, whosoever thou art, who thinkest otherwise, I would only say, suit thine own palate.”

Now a mark whereby to distinguish between spiritual and animal love, as Imām Ghazāly lays it down in many of his works, is this: If any one finds the same sort of delight in beauty as in looking on the verdure of nature, the course of waters, and the like, it is a sign that lust slumbers; and on this ground it is admissible. But if the delight is of another kind, such as to put lust in motion, it is the cupidinous and animal inclination, and therein illicit. Likewise the wise aver, that in spiritual love the yearning is more upon gestures and words than upon parts and symmetries: for if the spirit yearns, it is for spiritual things, and not for corporeal ones. But love being a subject on which there is no dis­coursing so as to obviate all its inherent taints, we limit ourselves to this instalment, and pass on to our original matter.