Hitherto I had
stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this
occasion consider'd, with my master Tryon, the taking every
fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had,
or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter.
All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great
lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it
smelt admirably well. I balanc'd some time between principle
and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened,
I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I,
"If you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I
din'd upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people,
returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet.
So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it
enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind
to do.
Keimer and I liv'd on a pretty good familiar footing, and agreed
tolerably well, for he suspected nothing of my setting up.
He retained a great deal of his old enthusiasms and lov'd argumentation.
We therefore had many disputations. I used to work him so with my
Socratic method, and had trepann'd him so often by questions apparently
so distant from any point we had in hand, and yet by degrees lead
to the point, and brought him into difficulties and contradictions,
that at last he grew ridiculously cautious, and would hardly answer
me the most common question, without asking first, "What do you
intend to infer from that?" However, it gave him so high an opinion
of my abilities in the confuting way, that he seriously proposed my
being his colleague in a project he had of setting up a new sect.
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