“Don’t be too sure of that,” I retorted.

“I have never heard a convincing argument which condemns it, Frank; I do not believe such a reason exists.”

“Don’t forget,” I said, “that this practice which you defend is condemned by a hundred generations of the most civilised races of mankind.”

“Mere prejudice of the unlettered, Frank.”

“And what is such a prejudice?” I asked.  “It is the reason of a thousand generations of men, a reason so sanctified by secular experience that it has passed into flesh and blood and become an emotion and is no longer merely an argument.  I would rather have one such prejudice held by men of a dozen different races than a myriad reasons.  Such a prejudice is incarnate reason approved by immemorial experience.

“What argument have you against cannibalism; what reason is there why we should not fatten babies for the spit and eat their flesh?  The flesh is sweeter, African travellers tell us, than any other meat, tenderer at once and more sustaining; all reasons are in favour of it.  What hinders us from indulging in this appetite but prejudice, sacred prejudice, an instinctive loathing at the bare idea?

“Humanity, it seems to me, is toiling up a long slope leading from the brute to the god:  again and again whole generations, sometimes whole races, have fallen back and disappeared in the abyss.  Every slip fills the survivors with fear and horror which with ages have become instinctive, and now you appear and laugh at their fears and tell them that human flesh is excellent food, and that sterile kisses are the noblest form of passion.  They shudder from you and hate and punish you, and if you persist they will kill you.  Who shall say they are wrong?  Who shall sneer at their instinctive repulsion hallowed by ages of successful endeavour?”

“Fine rhetoric, I concede,” he replied, “but mere rhetoric.  I never heard such a defence of prejudice before.  I should not have expected it from you.  You admit you don’t share the prejudice; you don’t feel the horror, the instinctive loathing you describe.  Why?  Because you are educated, Frank, because you know that the passion Socrates felt was not a low passion, because you know that Caesar’s weakness, let us say, or the weakness of Michelangelo or of Shakespeare, is not despicable.  If the desire is not a characteristic of the highest humanity, at least it is consistent with it."[30]

“I cannot admit that,” I answered.  “First of all, let us leave Shakespeare out of the question, or I should have to ask you for proofs of his guilt, and there are none.  About the others there is this to be said, it is not by imitating the vices and weaknesses of great men that we shall get to their level.  And suppose we are fated to climb above them, then their weaknesses are to be dreaded.