Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/93

 the visions pictured by the mind during the disease of the body, or in the ecstatic condition, have their birth in the mind itself, and take their form from the teachings with which that mind has been imbued. They may, indeed, seem utterly unlike those we should expect from the known character of the visionary, just as the thoughts of a dying man may be, and often are, very far removed from the objects which had occupied all his attention during the later years of his life. But if the history of the childhood and youth of an ecstatic could be fully known, or if (which is exceedingly unlikely) we could obtain a strictly truthful account of such matters from himself, we should find nearly every circumstance of his visions explained, or at least an explanation suggested. For, after all, much which would be necessary to exactly show the origin of all he saw, would be lost, since the brain retains impressions of many things of which the conscious memory has entirely passed away.

The vivid picturing of forgotten events of life is a familiar experience of the opium-eater. Thus De Quincey says: "The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived. I could not be said to recollect them, for, if I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to acknowledge them as part of my past experience. But placed as they were before me in dreams like intuitions and clothed in all their evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognized them instantaneously." A similar return of long-forgotten scenes and incidents to the mind may be noticed, though not to the same degree, when wine has been taken in moderate quantity after a long fast.

The effects of hasheesh are specially interesting in this connection, because, unless a very powerful dose has been taken, the hachischin does not wholly lose the power of introspection, so that he is able afterward to recall what has passed through his mind when he was under the influence of the drug. Now Moreau, in his interesting "Études Psychologiques" ("Du Hachich et d'Aliénation Mentale"), says that the first result of a dose sufficient to produce the hasheesh fantasia is a feeling of intense happiness. "It is really happiness which is produced by the hasheesh; and by this simply an enjoyment entirely moral, and by no means sensual as we might be induced to suppose. This is surely a very curious circumstance; and some remarkable inferences might be drawn from it; this, for instance, among others—that every feeling of joy and gladness, even when the cause of it is exclusively moral—that those enjoyments which are least connected with material objects, the most spiritual, the most ideal, may be nothing else than sensations purely physical, developed in the interior of the system, as are those procured by hasheesh. At least so far as relates to that of which we are internally conscious, there is no distinction between these two orders of sensations, in spite of the diversity in the causes to which they are due; for the hasheesh-eater is happy, not like the gourmand or the famished man when satisfying his appetite, or the voluptuary in