Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/88

78 contact of tobacco with the nerves of taste produces instant and uncontrollable nausea, though I am exceedingly fond of smoking, and have always been reckoned a connoisseur in flavors. I should add, however, that offensive sights, as of a person deformed or idiotic, and offensive odors, have the same effect, and instantaneously produce violent nausea.

The physiological effect of tobacco, when I first began to use it, was intense and disagreeable, producing contraction of the pupil of the eye, dizziness, labored breathing, and considerable tendency to spasms; and as these symptoms were more marked with the pipe than with the cigar, in which the pyrieline is mostly disengaged by the surrounding atmosphere, I conclude that they were due in the main not to the nicotine, but to the pyrieline and picoline bases, which are more immediately responsible for the first poisonous action of tobacco-juice when swallowed. Their action is more rapid when taken internally than when subcutaneously injected; and, though substantially identical with that of nicotine, is rather less distinctly narcotic, rather less immediately nervous, and rather more definite in its tendency to produce convulsions. As the nerves become habituated to the narcotic, a state of pleasant and exhilarated reverie, after smoking a few minutes, superseded the more obtrusive symptoms, and lasted sometimes half an hour or more, when languor supervened; and, as the habit became settled, it was accompanied by a mental aura, marked by general tendency to abstraction, and by a dreamy, metaphysical habit of thought. Vague generalizations took the place of real observation in the physical sciences to a greater extent than is compatible with progress in physics. I was intolerant of particulars, and impatient with nicety of discrimination, although I had previously been of extremely analytic habit, and noted in the academy and at college for subtilty as an algebraist. I had my logic of shadows and reveries, and was, withal, a little inclined to mysticism after the German pattern, and to vast theological speculations.

At the same time there was some gain in repose of nerve from the use of the weed, and some trifling gain in mental concentration, particularly as respected the study of Hegel, Schelling, Kant, and the German metaphysicians at large which happened just then to be in my way. Hegel's anima mundi and I were on terms of familiar intimacy, and Schelling's fine discrimination between the different shades of shadows was accepted as really valuable in its contributions to philosophical literature. I mean no disrespect to Hegel and Kant, whose definition of life as self-aim has the merit of brevity, and will, perhaps, by-and-by, have to be incorporated into biology; only generalizing is by so many degrees easier than investigation that men come, I think, sooner or later—some sooner, some later—to have a kind of contempt for mere metaphysical speculation, however imposing its painted bubbles of imagined reality, and to long for a little truth