THE CONFESSION OF A REFORMED SMOKER. 79 



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 un- 

 derlying principles ; and it was not until years after, when the passion 

 for physics had possessed me, that it occurred to me that the anima 

 mundi was but an ancient whim under a new name, and that the in- 

 finite 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 firm- 

 ness, 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 ques- 

 tion whether the tobacco-habit was not largely instrumental in engen- 

 dering 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 con- 

 sciousness. 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 me- 

 dulla 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 influ- 

 ence 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 



