The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

If a man can get no other food it is more natural for him to kill another man and eat him than to starve.  Our horror is rather at the circumstances that make it natural for the man to do this than at the man himself.  So with other things the desire for which is inherited through countless ancestors, it is more natural for men to obtain the nearest thing they can to these, even by the most abnormal means if the ordinary channels are closed, than to forego them altogether.  The abnormal growth should be regarded as disease but, nevertheless, as showing more health and vigour than no growth at all would do.  I said this in Life and Habit (ch. iii. p. 52) when I wrote “it is more righteous in a man that he should eat strange food and that his cheek so much as lank not, than that he should starve if the strange food be at his command.” {30}