“Stewart is the most eloquent man on the subject of nature I have ever met.”

— Thomas De Quincey (c.1792), discussion with William Wordsworth (IQ:165|#231); view concurred (Ѻ)

“The Poles are advanced in knowledge; but their diets hold forth a dreadful scene of the conflict of private and public good.”

Stewart's frontispiece, to his The Moral State of Nations (1790), showing Nature (or Mother Nature), being benighted by the artifices of priests of politics and religion; amid which philosophy consumes their screen in order to display the universality of transmutations; below which the following poem is shown: [4] For Self and Nature linked in one great frame; Shows true Self-love and Nature’s as the same. Eternal matter to one center brings Men changed to boasts, and insects changed to kings. Who dares with force on Nature's chain to strike; On man or insects, jars the chain alike On Self, which changing never quits the chain In life or death, transmits or joy or pain. The philosopher's scroll, seen by the light of fire, reads: Revelation of Nature: Reason, Humanity, Justice.

“British traveler, was born in London of humble parentage. After an unruly career at school he entered the service of the East India Company at Madras in 1763, but he threw up his position about two years later and became interpreter to Hyder Ali, afterwards serving as a general in his army; subsequently he served the nabob of Arcot, whose chief minister he became. Having enriched himself in this capacity, he began a series of travels through India, Persia, Ethiopia and Abyssinia, which earned him the nickname of "Walking Stewart." About 1783 he returned to Europe, where he cut a curious figure by wearing Armenian dress. He crossed over to America in 1791 and had various adventures, but soon came back to Europe, and made the acquaintance of Wordsworth in Paris and later of De Quincey in Bath. Be-coming short of money, he again went to America, where he supported himself by lecturing. Having returned to Europe, Stewart's fortunes began to mend. In 1813 a claim he had made against the nabob of Arcot was settled by the East India Company for £1o,00o, and he took rooms in London and settled down to enjoy life, airing his opinions on literature and art. He died on the loth of February 1822. De Quincey (see Collected Writings, 1890, vol. iii.) gives various particulars of him.”

● Stewart, John. (1790). The Moral State of Nations: Travels Over the Most Interesting Parts of the Globe, to Discover the Source of Moral Motion; Communicated to Lead Mankind Through the Conviction of the Senses to Intellectual Existence, and an Enlightened State of Nature. In the Year of Man's Retrospective Knowledge, by Astronomical Calculation 5000. Year of the Common Era, 1790. George H. Evans, 1837.

“From 1789 to his death in 1822 (allegedly from laudanum overdose), he produced reams of poetic and polemic work with extraordinary titles like The Apocalypse of Nature, The Revolution of Reason, and The Sophiometer: the Regulator of Mental Power. Published in England, France and the United States, they were idiosyncratically dated according to a chronological system in which 1795 was the ‘fifth year of intellectual existence’, or the publication of The Apocalypse of Nature’ and 1818 was the ‘7000th year of the Astronomical History, from the Chinese Tables’.”

“Body and identity of man or manhood, like fire and heat, may be changed or commuted, and in portions what was fire may become man, and what was man become fire; the connection with nature being the same in all its parts, animate or inanimate; but motion in the former has the power of procuring happy combinations or identities; and the volition that propels that motion is motived by happiness, which it procures to its present, and perpetuates to all future stages of its revolution into sensitive nature, by which self, or the moral system, is temporally and eternally benefited.”

Stewart's five main tenets of his "moral motion" natural religion theory.

I. NATURE is the great integer of being, or matter and motion, without beginning as without end.

II. Mankind are the instruments of nature in its moral motion, formed to procure well-being or happiness to all animated matter.

III. All animated matter, however organized, changed, or dissolved, is related as parts inseparable from the great integer nature.

IV. Bodies "intellectualized" and possessing identifications of I, you, and they, are created to possess consciousness of existence by sensations of pleasure and pain; and though these [individual identities] are annihilated upon the dissolution of the bodies, they still, as parts of nature, are concerned in the future pain and pleasure of their common integer, from which they are inseparable, though subject to endless change and revolution.

V. Moral and physical motion are subject to fixed laws, which produce volition—the cause of action in animate matter.

VI. The judgment or result of the operation of the mental faculties can have cognizance only of secondary causes which it apparently controls and directs to produce well-being or happiness to its essence, which it will ever suppose to be the end [object] of primary causes.

VII. The human intellect has no power beyond the secondary causes of volition, and their end, which is happiness, all beyond being incomprehensibility; and the reasoning of analogy can influence only from its probability, and that must be considered relative to the happiness of all animated nature.

VIII. Man, in forming a volition to procure happiness, begins with self as the center, and extends to the circle formed by all animate matter. He is to will for himself alone, and do no violence to any part of animate matter; and in the orbit of social attraction he must imitate the revolution of the celestial bodies, whose reciprocal repulsion and attraction operate without concussion or violence to the center, or the point, self. Man cedes not, but reforms his volition when it is in collision with that of another, to acquire more happiness, considering himself a component part in this eternal relation to the great integer of nature; and by this means he produces and eternizes a system of moral harmony, or pain and pleasure, of which he must ever be a center, and participate as an eternal part of an eternal integer; which connection is indissoluble, though its mode is incomprehensible, and passes through every form of matter in an infinite revolution.

“Self, as a part of all nature, is immortal and universal, and though identity of matter and mind separate, and their combination or identity is annihilated by death; yet self, as a part of nature, can never be annihilated, and pervades all nature in its revolutions and operations, and self is as much concerned in the present or future health or happiness of all nature, as the toe is concerned in that of the body.

Men who have no superstitious fears, suppose the dissolution of the body to end their concern with nature; but if their mental faculties were still more enlightened, they would see, that particular combinations of matter, called intellectualized bodies, are but stations or inns to receive matter in its revolution, and that those inns are to be regulated by laws and policy, to give comfort and pleasure to matter in its eternal revolution or passage, and from which self can never separate its connection.

Matter may be divided into two parts, intellectualized and unintellectualized, and these are constantly changing places; so that the former, by wise operations, labors to the happiness of both. By education and constitutions good moulds are formed to receive matter, and by a wise government happy inns or resting places are provided; and while it enjoys this happiness it has produced, it prepares it for unintellectualized matter, and prepares it for its own return in the general revolution.

When the mind takes into contemplation a subject of such importance, novelty, and magnitude, as the religion of nature, it is apprehensive and alarmed, and descends with caution and terror into its vast profundity.”

“When the mind takes into contemplation a subject of such importance, novelty and magnitude, as the religion of nature, it is apprehensive and alarmed, and descends with caution and terror into its vast profundity. In subjects and researches of infinitely less utility and consequence, how many minds have been debilitated and distracted! The mathematics have sacrificed many victims, astronomy more, the longitude and chemistry have absorbed and deranged many of the most strongly organized faculties, but the subject of religion has so universally deranged and destroyed the human faculties, that reason seems to have lost its powers of pre-eminence, and instinct would be preferred, but that the former contains innate elastic matter, which, when heated by the sun of wisdom, must expand, and reason then assume its pre-eminence and dignity.”

“Agitated, though not confounded by these discouraging reflections, I shall proceed to give the course of exposition to my thoughts without any regard to ceremonious rules of literature on one hand, or the menaces of prejudice on the other.”

The basic outline of Stewart's moral vegetarianism ideologies; for humans, as "sentient intellectualized animate matter", eating meat is "immoral" owing to the "violence" involved in the procurement of meat and the "sacred passion of sympathy", but it's lower animals to eat meat, because they are uneducated.

See also: Newton in Senegal

“The first art, and the most useful, which quality alone, in an enlightened slate of nature gives pre-eminence, is agriculture, as on this depends the existence of animate matter; and though a greater proportion of the human race subsist by devouring sentient fellow parts of this matter, yet this evil must cease in an enlightened state of nature; and man, the great instrument by which nature operates her own perfection, the moment he is called to intellectual existence, must change his aliment from animal to vegetable, in order to procure both health of body and health of mind. For as animal food tends to pamper the body with gross humors, and inflame the blood which gives strength to the passions, and in the same proportion debilitates the reason, so it must engender disease and vice; but vegetable diet has the contrary effect, which may be proved at any time by experience: though it requires a delicacy of attention, and accuracy of judgment to discover such results.

A man in an enlightened state of nature will be averse to the violence necessary to procure subsistence by animal food, and the only violence he will permit, and that with extreme regret, will be the destruction of destructive creatures, whom he cannot change by education or prevent by restriction: both of which means he will first attempt, in order that the "sacred passion of sympathy" may receive no callosity or diminution by hasty or voluntary violence,”

“The title page of a book ought to give the reader some insight into the author's design: but from those titles which arc prefixed to the two volumes before us, we were not able to form any conjecture respecting their contents; and after the most careful perusal, we are not certain that we understand the work sufficiently to make our readers acquainted with the author's leading ideas. The only thing of which we are sure, is, that this ‘traveling philosopher’ is, in his first volume, a haughty censor, and in the second, a professed enemy to all religion;— for a ‘religion of nature’, without a ‘god of nature’, is a solecism, too gross to pass on the meanest understanding.”

— Ralph Griffiths (1791), “Review of Stewart’s Moral Motion, Volumes 1 and 2” (pg. 143) [3]

“The remedy, which this wild projector proposes for correcting the disorders of human nature, is, to abandon every idea of deity, and every hope of "future existence", in the common acceptations of those terms; and to make the integer of nature, and self as connected with it, the sole objects of adoration; and to consider the design of providing for the happiness of those particles of matter, which happen to belong to our present bodies, through all their future connection with sentient beings, as the only comfortable and reasonable doctrine of immortality. This, if we are not greatly mistaken, is the whole of the wonderful discovery contained in a work, which calls itself the apocalypse of nature, and boasts of containing ‘the most important and useful ideas the press has ever presented to the discussion and contemplation of man’.”

— Ralph Griffiths (1791), “Review of Stewart’s Moral Motion, Volumes 1 and 2” (pg. 144) [3]

“In a disposition of mind interested in the happiness of all animated matter, the author of the following new ideas traversed the globe, and proposes to lay them before the public, conjuring his readers to pay them the attention their importance demands.”

— John Stewart (1790), Moral Motion (Preface) (pg. 7)

“The operations of knowledge are employed upon outward and foreign objects; but those of wisdom are internal, and applied only to the self. The greatest efforts of the former were exerted by Newton, to discover the physical laws of bodies; but when he attempted to make use of the latter to make discoveries in the moral world, he became an eminent example of deficiency in the quality of wisdom, and proved its greatest differences from knowledge.”

— John Stewart (1789), Moral Motion

A 1906 Dictionary of Indian Biography entry (Ѻ) on Stewart, wherein his work is described as "curious".

“The chimerical operations of religious phrenzy will be destroyed, by the doctrine of real existence.”

— John Stewart (1789), Moral Motion (xiii) [8]

“There is no doubt that all matter, however organized or modified, is subject to the same laws of nature.”

— John Stewart (1789), Moral Motion (§1, pg. 106)

“A weak mind, that attaches itself to identity alone, may not be able to conceive its eternal connection with Nature, but I defy a mind, that has arrived at the acme of intellect and considers the indestructibility of matter to separate itself from its eternal integer, though it can have no knowledge of the mode of connection.”

— John Stewart (1789), Moral Motion (§2, pg. 12)

“The volition of man may be regarded as the source of moral motion, and takes its birth from outward or inward impression.”

— John Stewart (1789), Moral Motion (§2, pg. 13)

“We find in that combination of matter, called man, two powers, one passive, and the other active. The first is the corporeal power, formed of the visible and tangible parts, called body: the other is the result of the organization of that body, forming the power vulgarly called soul.”

— John Stewart (1789), Moral Motion (§2, pg. 16)

“Self, as a part of all Nature, is immortal and universal, and though identity of matter and mind separate, and their combination or identity is annihilated by death; yet self as a part of nature, can never be annihilated; self pervades all nature in its revolutions and operations, and self is as much concerned in the present or future health and happiness of all nature, as the hand is concerned in that of the body.”

— John Stewart (1789), Moral Motion (§2, pg. 23)

“Personal identity. is that state of matter in which it possesses a consciousness of existence, and power of motion to procure happiness for the present, and thereby perpetuate it in every stage of its transmutation or revolution; and no change of that identity by loss of memory or by death, can dissolve the connection with its integer Nature, but like a river absorbed by the ocean, it transmutes into all forms of matter, and returns to rivers again.”

— John Stewart (1789), Moral Motion (§2, pg. 29)

“To assist these meditations, these pages, I hope, will be useful; if not, I must recommend the writings of Hume, Voltaire, Bolingbroke, Rousseau, and last of all Mirabaud [D'Holbach,] who has completed the destruction of error in his System of Nature: and when, conversant with these writings, the mind shall be purged of its errors and prejudices, these pages will, I trust, be useful to introduce it to a system of wisdom and happiness.”

— John Stewart (1790), Moral Motion (§2, pg. 43)

“If these observations are not comprehensible or satisfactory, I must refer my reader to the System of Nature written in French by M. Mirabaud [now ascribed to Baron d’Holbach] where error is so closely combatted and pursued in all its recesses, that the mind by irresistible conviction emerges from its abyss, and seeks with impatience a new guide, or the light of nature, which I hope will be found in these pages, and that they will form a complete supplement to that work.”

— John Stewart (1789), Moral Motion (§2, pg. 78)

“Body and identity of man or manhood, like fire and heat, may be changed or commuted, and in portions what was fire may become man. and what was man become fire; the connection with nature being the same in all its parts, animate or inanimate; but motion in the former has the power of procuring happy combinations or identities; and the volition that propels that motion is, motived by happiness, which it procures to its present, and perpetuates to all future stages of its revolution into sensitive nature, by which self, or the moral system, is temporally and eternally benefited. The religion of nature differs from invented religion, as the former adores the effect of motion, which is comprehensible, and the latter the cause of motion, which is incomprehensible.”

— John Stewart (1789), Moral Motion (§2, pg. 81)

Stewart applies his new "moral motion" theory of natural religion to the instance of a person being "incommoded by a fly", the justice of the act being determined by the "utility to the system of nature, the only standard of moral motion or action", according to which it is not OK to destroy the fly, per reason that it "disproportions the means to the end", but that it would be OK to destroy a tiger or lion set loose in a human environment.

“Let us suppose that a man, who is incommoded by a fly, instead of driving it away, kills it. Utility to the system of nature, the only standard of moral motion or action, may be applied to this act in the following manner: the fly in committing an act of violence on my body, agitates the chain of nature (see: great chain of being): it is useful to remove this cause, but utility does not demand the annihilation of it by death, because it disproportions the means to the end, and infects, by a motive of resentment, the disposition of the mind for universal sympathy and benevolence. The destruction of the tiger and lion, when brought to the standard of utility, may be justified in proportion to the violence they cause the human specks, which, as being the most happy existence of matter, is to be preferred to the brute. When the tiger infests the environs of man's habitation, utility requires him to be destroyed, and this would cause no vibration of the chain, because it would re-establish a counterpoise to the effect of the concussion began by the violence of the tiger; but when the hunter wantonly seeks him in the forest to destroy him, to promote the pleasure of the chase, the chain of nature would be agitated by this act of remote utility; for utility must be urgent to justify the least act of violence, otherwise the volition becomes corrupted, and the source of moral motion being polluted, its streams would convey the cause of moral pestilence or vice over all Humanity.”

— John Stewart (1789), Moral Motion (§2, pg. 82)