by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use
has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from
savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it.
To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life,
Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable
grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of the forest
or the mountain’s shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than
Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may,
accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food,
Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are we
prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a
prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and
cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth
of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the
present necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the
same second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately
retain our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel,
that is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not
cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the
inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were
well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these
naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great
surprise, “to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a
roasting.” So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity,
while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine
the hardiness of these savages with the intellectualness of the
civilized man? According to Liebig, man’s body is a stove, and food the
fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. In cold
weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the result of a
slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too
rapid; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the
fire goes out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with
fire; but so much for analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above
list, that the expression, _animal life_, is nearly synonymous with the
expression, _animal heat_; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel
which keeps up the fire within us,—and Fuel serves only to prepare that
Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from
without,—Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the _heat_ thus
generated and absorbed.
The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the
vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with our
Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our
night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this
shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves
at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is
a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer
directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes
possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food,
is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are
sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various,
and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half
unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my
own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a
wheelbarrow, &c., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and
access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be
obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side
of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves
to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live,—that is,
keep comfortably warm,—and die in New England at last. The luxuriously
rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I
implied before, they are cooked, of course _à la mode_.
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are
not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of
mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever
lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient
philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than
which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward.
We know not much about them. It is remarkable that _we_ know so much of
them as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and
benefactors of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of
human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary
poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in
