DISEASE OF THE BODY A MENTAL STIMULANT. 83 



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 oc- 

 cupied all his attention during the later years of his life. But if the his- 

 tory of the childhood and youth of an ecstatic could be fully known, or 

 if (which is exceedingly unlikely) we could obtain a strictly truthful ac- 

 count of such matters from himself, we should find nearly every circum- 

 stance of his visions explained, or at least an explanation suggested. 

 For, after all, much which would be necessary to exactly show the ori- 

 gin 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 expe- 

 rience of the opium-eater. Thus De Quincey says : " The minutest 

 incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often re- 

 vived. 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 after- 

 ward to recall what has passed through his mind when he was under 

 the influence of the drug. Now Moreau, in his interesting " Etudes 

 Psychologiques " ("Du Hachich etd' Alienation 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 pro- 

 duced 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 sen- 

 sations 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 grati- 



