OPIUM AND ITS ANTIDOTE. 557 



sense of torpor creeps over the whole frame ; the thoughts are like 

 the ever-shifting scenes of a phantasmagoria, on which we passively 

 gaze, without will or effort to alter the series. Still, so long as the 

 intoxication is not deep, such effort is possible. One feels that he is 

 falling asleep, and that if he would but bestir himself he might over- 

 come his drowsiness. But little by little the legs grow heavy, the 

 arms fall to the sides almost powerless, and the weighted eyelids 

 refuse to remain open. A dreamy, rambling sort of thinking still 

 goes on, and there is as yet no sleep ; we are still conscious of 

 the world around. We indistinctly hear the tic-tac of the clock 

 and the rumble of passing vehicles, but it is as though, so to speak, 

 another person were listening and not we. The active, conscious 

 Me exists no more, and auother personality seems to have taken its 

 place. Gradually everything becomes more and more indistinct, our 

 thoughts are enveloped in a haze, we feel ourselves detached from 

 matter, detached from our bodies, and transformed into thought, 

 which flits about, so to speak, becoming more and more brilliant, but 

 at the same time more and more confused. Then the outer world dis- 

 appears, and there remains only an inner world, sometimes full of 

 tumult and delirium, and producing feverish excitement, or, as is 

 more frequently the case, calm and quiet, and full of delightful re- 

 pose. This intoxication is purely psychical, and far superior to the 

 intoxication produced by alcohol or hasheesh, for, though hasheesh 

 gives one a few hours of insanity, opium gives sleep, and with this 

 boon there is nothing that can compare. One must have suffered from 

 insomnia in order to appreciate the value of opium. It brings sleep, 

 and it banishes pain. 



It is one of the most powerful agents we possess for modifying 

 the sensibility, but whether it does this by acting upon the sensor 

 nerves or on the brain we know not with certainty. Even where it 

 does not procure sleep, it has the singular power of calming the ex- 

 citability of the nerves, and of subduing that morbid state of the 

 sensibility called by physicians hyperesthesia. It has been observed 

 that when it reduces hyperesthesia it does not cause sleep, all its 

 force seemingly being spent in combating pain. In cases of stubborn 

 neuralgia opium appeases suffering, and a larger dose is required to 

 produce sleep. But is it not enough that it allays the irritability 

 of a diseased nerve ? Some persons cannot live without opium, and 

 they swallow enormous quantities of it without perceptible effect. 

 Herein opium differs widely from alcohol. Alcohol is cumulative in 

 its effects, and the more one is addicted to its use, the more easily is 

 he intoxicated by it. One does not become habituated to alcohol in- 

 toxication, but with opium the case is different ; one may become so 

 accustomed to it as to be able to drink daily a litre of laudanum, 

 twenty drops of which would be a strong enough medicinal dose for 

 a non-habituated person. 



