Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/89

Rh founded on fact, not on mysterious trains of ratiocination, having no basis except an introspective one.

On the other hand, there was some loss of sympathy with life. The actual was hazy and Rembrandtish. Day in and day out I speculated on Hegelian nothings—mere dodges in words—as if they had been underlying principles; and it was not until years after, when the passion for physics had possessed me, that it occurred to me that the anima mudi was but an ancient whim under a new name, and that the infinite potentiality which the Hegelists talk about was simply a symbol in nine syllables for something that in plain English (or German) is expressed in one a—gain in grandeur of phrase to be sure, but no real gain in other respects.

That these paragraphs fairly contrast the psychological exponents of the tobacco-habit with the normal condition of my mind, I have been able to satisfy myself by many experiments. By refraining from the use of tobacco for three or four weeks, on a few occasions longer than that, I have returned to the old dramatic sympathy with life; while, by taking up the habit again, I have leaped in a day from the one condition to the other. This experiment I have repeated many times within the past five years, always with the same transition from one series of psychological experiences to the other and very different series. I fancy Nero must have been a smoker, though there is no record of tobacco in those days; for a great deal that passes for firmness, and not a little that passes for cruelty, in this world, is but the apathy of narcotism in its maturer stages. Indeed, it is an open question whether the tobacco-habit was not largely instrumental in engendering the peculiar stoicism of the American Indian and in promoting its culture.

As the process of narcotizing is persisted in, languor attacks the will, there is sinking at the heart on waking up in the morning, the system craves stimulants with a mighty and unappeasable craving, and the motor centres respond but numbly to the motions of consciousness. The incapacity to recollect that marks the advanced stage is clearly the result of languid volition, engendered by torpor of the motor centres.

These symptoms indicate that the great nervo-vital centre, the medulla oblongata, which distributes its forces alike to body and brain, coordinated now as vital phenomena, now as psychical phenomena, is more or less involved, and that vital paralysis is liable to supervene at any juncture. But even at this stage the symptoms yield so rapidly to abstinence as to leave no doubt in my mind that the specific influence of the tobacco is transmitted directly to the great vital tract by means of the pneumogastric nerve. The depressed action of the heart, long before the cerebral centres are involved, points directly to this conclusion, and the augmented gastric and salivary secretions indicate the same avenue of action. The tendency to congestion of the lungs