254 ROUGH WAYS MADE SMOOTH. 



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 

 experience of the opium-eater. Thus De Quincey says : 

 ' The minutest incidents of childhood or forgotten scenes of 

 later years, were often revived. 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 circum- 

 stances and accompanying feelings, I recognised them in- 

 stantaneously.' 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 hachisch 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 afterwards to recall what 

 has passed through his mind when he was under the in- 

 fluence of the drug. Now Moreau, in his interesting Etudes 

 Psychologies (Du Hachich et tf Alienation Mentale\ says 

 that the first result of a dose sufficient to produce the hachisch 

 fantasia is a feeling of intense happiness. * It is really 

 happiness which is produced by the hachisch ; 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 in- 

 ferences 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 sensations 

 purely physical, developed in the interior of the system, as 

 are those procured by hachisch. 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 



