Because of the common admonition to "cease eating while yet hungry" some writer has ingeniously pictured to the thousands who rise from every meal with an unsatisfied appetite, never being free from the companionship of hunger because of poverty, the great blessing it is to them, as it insures them at least "three score and ten years" of the same kind of happiness.

This develops another phase of the question of regulation. There is a vast difference between going hungry (fasting) from dire necessity and doing so voluntarily for a special purpose. The poverty-striken man is doubly starved. He not only lacks nutritious food, but he constantly gives himself auto-suggestions of hunger, suffering, and want, checking his natural supply of vital force from within, while the voluntary faster evokes thoughts of positiveness to the pangs of hunger, feeling that some great purpose is to be gained by the endurance, thus arousing a greater supply of subjective vital force which is sustaining. As this condition of mental buoyancy cannot be maintained indefinitely, it would be but little value to the poor man, for, as soon as his mind dropped from the psychological state, his own surplus nerve energy would be drawn upon to supply that not furnished by regular food. A strong person, who can perceive and command his inner forces, can maintain a normal weight, while fasting, for a longer time than one, like a consumptive, who is already reduced and does not know how to arouse subjective vitality.

Long fasting is a dangerous method of curing disease. It is like getting rich by stopping one's income and using up the cash on hand. Notwithstanding this, one prominent reformer claims, that if Dr. Tanner could live forty days without food, in time all men might learn to live without eating at all. Strange the process by which some reason!

It has not occurred to him that long fasting is an endurance rather than a direct logical system of advance. A man can endure standing for a week with his thumbs tied, but it will not add many years to his natural life.

Fasting for a meal, or for a day, or a fruit fast - eating only a little fruit for a few days - is of great value in acquiring self-control and in cleansing the system. The virtue of short fasting has always been known in religion, and it is from this extreme fasts have originated. The mind that must overcome the pangs of hunger is lifted in a way that commands infinite force, the body force not yet being consumed. The sacrifice is endured as a religious duty and the high purpose is sustaining.

The same conditions are true in regard to sleep. Necessity, or pleasure, arouses the vitality for great endurance, but loss of sleep cannot be continuous without consuming more tissue than is replaced. The "four-hour-a-night-sleep-club" is the climax of fads, being eclipsed only by the "suicide club".